(LODI) Standalone Software

About

Background: One traditional approach to the diagnosis of a mental disorder has been for a clinician to use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association, to assist them in making diagnoses for their patients. The DSM contains a list of all recognized mental disorders and exhibited symptoms associated with each disorder. For each disorder, the DSM provides a count of symptoms that must be present to diagnose a patient as suffering from the disorder. However, this approach has a number of disadvantages.  One disadvantage is that clinicians must rely on a symptom count for their diagnosis. Because a DSM diagnosis relies on a symptom count instead of examining which symptoms are being exhibited by the patient, the importance of specific symptoms being exhibited is not factored into the analysis of the disorder.  Another disadvantage is that the DSM does not provide a clinician a confidence level for their diagnosis. Two patients may exhibit completely different symptoms and may be diagnosed with the same disorder, even though the clinician is more confident that one patient has the disorder than the other patient. The issue is particularly problematic when the clinician is "on the fence" about a diagnosis.  Another disadvantage is that the symptoms in the DSM are also not weighted. Thus, one symptom is no more determinative of the disorder than another symptom. The DSM does not take into account the probabilities of the symptoms occurring in a disorder, and thus has limitations as a tool in diagnosing disorders.    Technology: This innovation helps to address the all-too-common problem of misdiagnosis. Perhaps the most common question patients ask their health care providers is, "How certain are you?" The Likelihood of Diagnosis Index (LODI) provides a way for health care providers to quantify the degree of confidence or uncertainty associated with a diagnosis. It can be applied to all diagnoses that are syndromes (co-occurrences of symptoms) with particular relevance for psychiatric diagnoses.  This can be determined using a variety of techniques. One or more exhibited symptoms may be obtained for a patient. The likelihood that each symptom will be exhibited for the disorder can be computed, and a posterior probability of the disorder given the exhibited symptoms can be computed from the likelihood of the symptoms. Based on the resulting posterior probability of the disorder, a more accurate determination can be made of whether the patient is suffering from the disorder.   Application: 1. Diagnosis confirmation of mental disorders   Advantages: 1. The diagnosis is based on an individual's pattern of symptoms rather than a crude symptom count. In other words, the method weights each symptom according to its psychometric properties.  2. The method quantifies the confidence (or lack thereof) associated with the diagnosis.