During the last decade there has been a wealth of papers discussing the development
of scoring systems in medicine, some of which have led to fully operational computer-aided
diagnostic systems. In this paper we sketch the development of a simple scoring system
for one of the more common rheumatic diseases, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) using a two-tier
model, independence Bayes’ followed by logistic discrimination. The scoring system
gives reasonably well calibrated probability estimates of RA which suggests ways in
which the development of computerised systems in rheumatology might be approached.
Key-Words
Rheumatoid Arthritis - Logistic Regression - Epidemiology - Computer-Aided Diagnosis
- Bayes’ Discriminant
