Bayesian diagnosis: tutorial lessons

just covering the most basic parts

For the last ten years or so I’ve volunteered to help the local medical residents’ journal club with the statistics in their approximately monthly readings of new articles. The residents generally aren’t familiar with statistics and most are not especially comfortable with quantitative methods in general, so they seem to appreciate the help. Originally my wife (a legendary stats instructor) was to do it but after a couple of sessions a schedule conflict came up and I drifted into the role. We had big ambitions for not only helping with individual papers but for doing some more general teaching. Overall that hasn’t worked out, mainly because the residents are under extreme time pressure.
In one optimistic phase I set out to create a series of lessons gradually introducing systematic Bayesian ways of making probabilistic diagnoses. I made the first two lessons in the form of Powerpoint presentations with pauses for brief quizzes to see if the viewer needs to review the previous part before going on. Making these turns out to be harder than I expected, literally about one hour of work for each recorded minute. Although I’d planned to do about four to cover the material needed for typical medical differential diagnoses, my health issues and laziness intervened. Still, I hope the first two lessons will help people (not just MDs) get started on using systematic probabilistic reasoning in practice.

To get these to work you have to download them and play as a slide showing PPT, not in Google docs. If you aren’t hearing my unpleasant voice, it’s not playing correctly.

Here’s the first presentation.

Here’s the second presentation.

These are free for any non-commercial use.

As always, I’d love to hear reactions.