[Evaluation of the appropriateness of prescribing non-invasive cardiologic tests].

Background: We evaluated the appropriateness of the prescription of echocardiography, exercise testing, Holter monitoring and vascular sonography for ambulatory patients, performed during 4 weeks in 21 outpatient laboratories in Tuscany and Umbria, Italy.

Methods: We collected the following data: the appropriateness of the prescription (according to the guidelines of the Italian Federation of Cardiology), the prescribing physician (cardiologist vs noncardiologist), the synthetic result (normal vs abnormal) and the clinical utility (useful vs useless) of each exam.

Results: We evaluated 5614 prescriptions (patients: 3027 males, 2587 females; mean age 63 years, range 14-96 years).

[Patterns of information and informed consent procedures. Study of the Ethical Commission of the ANMCO].

A survey on patterns of information and informed consent procedures during daily clinical practice has been performed by the Ethical Commission of ANMCO. A structured questionnaire (38 questions) was sent to the 653 cardiological units of the National Health Service in Italy. Four hundred and eighty (73.

Knowledge-based and data-driven models in arrhythmia fuzzy classification.

Objectives: Fuzzy rules automatically derived from a set of training examples quite often produce better classification results than fuzzy rules translated from medical knowledge. This study aims to investigate the difference in domain representation between a knowledge-based and a data-driven fuzzy system applied to an electrocardiography classification problem.

Methods: For a three-class electrocardiographic arrhythmia classification task a set of fifteen fuzzy rules is derived from medical expertise on the basis of twelve electrocardiographic measures.