During years, the development of medical systems (as part of Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS)) has been one of the main research fields in biomedical informatics area. Different systems have been proposed to improve the quality of medical practice in several different areas such as pharmacy management, electronic health records, diagnosis systems, telemedicine, and medical imaging among others.
Several approaches and models have been developed since, the earliest 60s. Also several methods and techniques from the fields of artificial intelligence, decision theory, and statistics have been introduced into models of the medical management of patients (diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up); in some of these models, assessment of the expected prognosis constitutes an integral part. Typically, recent prognostic methods rely on explicit (patho)physiological models, which may be combined with traditional models of life expectancy.
The main goals of this special issue were the publication of new algorithms and mathematical methods, decision theories, techniques, and models based on probabilistic and quantitative approaches to solve existing or new issues.