hsplab@ecsvax.UUCP (03/11/84)
One reason why computerized EKG's have become so popular in the medical
environment is that **most** of the EKGs are performed on normal people
and are being used as a screening process. This means that if a computer
program is very good at differentiating between normals and abnormals
without any other capability (not true with current programs), it will
probably do better than 90%. It is for this reason that a cardiologist
overview is used primarily to catch gross errors and to refine problems
associated with pathological cases. In a study done by Bailey at the
NIH in the early 1970's, most computer programs actually did rather well,
and if you removed interpretation differences which were common among
cardiologists and tested the programs on grossly abnormal cases, they
were able to achieve better than 60%-70% accuracy.
David Chou
Department of Pathology
University of NC, Chapel Hill
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