Abstract

Issues in the constraints on the validity of computerized psychiatric diagnosis are illustrated by the analysis of diagnoses produced by treating clinicians, expert diagnosticians, and the DIAGNO III computer diagnostic system. The results indicate modest agreement between the computerized diagnoses and both clinicians and experts, and not much better agreement between the experts and between the treating clinicians. The main constraint on the validity of computerized diagnoses is not in any inherent limitation on computer processing but rather in the limitations of the current diagnostic system itself. Improvements in computer diagnosis await improvements in the diagnostic system, along the lines of simplification, explicit criteria, and limitation of the categories to those conditions for which validity evidence exists.

Keywords

Medical diagnosisConstraint (computer-aided design)Medical physicsComputer sciencePsychologyMedicinePathologyMathematics

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DIAGNO

IN RECENT YEARS there has been increased interest in using computers to arrive at a clinical diagnosis. Part of the present well-documented unreliability of psychiatric diagnose...

1968 Archives of General Psychiatry 166 citations

Publication Info

Year
1974
Type
article
Volume
31
Issue
2
Pages
197-197
Citations
83
Access
Closed

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Robert L. Spitzer (1974). Constraints on the Validity of Computer Diagnosis. Archives of General Psychiatry , 31 (2) , 197-197. https://doi.org/10.1001/archpsyc.1974.01760140049008

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DOI
10.1001/archpsyc.1974.01760140049008