Decision support in dermatology and medicine: history and recent developments.

This article is focused on diagnostic decision support tools and will provide a brief history of clinical decision support (CDS), examine the components of CDS and its associated terminology, and discuss recent developments in the use and application of CDS systems, particularly in the field of dermatology. For this article, we use CDS to mean an interactive system allowing input of patient-specific information and providing customized medical knowledge-based results via automated reasoning, for example, a set of rules and/or an underlying logic, and associations.