Unknown Cases

Medical professionals using the SimulConsult software can click a "Publish" button to transform their patient's findings into a set of pages on the Web.  The purpose of this to exchange or discuss the case on forums such as mailing lists for doctors.  Clinicians can click on links in the cases to jump into the SimulConsult software and work with the patient's findings inside a sophisticated decision support program. 

Medical professionals can register for a password needed to submit cases.  Institutions participating in the "case sharing project" for Educational Cases have password-free institutional access to the software.  To involve your institution, please contact SimulConsult.     

Guidelines for submitting "Unknown Cases":

• The case must be about a real patient.

• The diagnosis must unknown at the time of submission (for known diagnoses see Educational Cases).

• You must have been one of the medical professionals involved in some way. 

Clicking "File" and then "Publish Case" in the software automatically publishes a case to the Web, with appropriate privacy protections and editorial selection. 

The probabilities given by the software are not to be taken too seriously at this stage.  A high ranking of a particular disease in an unknown case means that one should take seriously the possibility that this may a diagnosis for the patient, but people should think seriously of other diagnoses since this is a tool under construction that is meant to supplement a clinician's thinking rather than replace clinical wisdom.  At this stage it gets many cases right but often goes off in wrong directions due to incomplete information in the database.  Users are encouraged to help modify or add information to the database to improve its information.

Typically a clinician would give the hyperlink of the case to colleague to help elicit suggestions on the diagnosis and workup.  You can use these hyperlinks on the internet, for example in discussion group lists.  The hyperlink is given when you finish submitting the case and it also appears in the log of cases.  Please let us know if you make a diagnosis - we will then add the case to the Educational Cases. 

View the cases (grouped by module):

Inherited and congenital Neurological diseases

Acknowledgements

Thanks for suggestions about the cases pages in general to: Drs. Barry Kosofsky, C. J. Malanga and James Reggin.  Acknowledgements for submission of cases are given in the pages for individual modules.