Granularity Explains Empirical Factor-of-Three Relation Between Probabilities of Pulmonary Embolism in Different Patient Categories

Authors

Beverly Rivera, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Francisco Zapata, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow

Publication Date

10-2014

Comments

Technical Report: UTEP-CS-14-67

Published in Mathematical Structures and Modeling, 2014, Vol. 32, pp. 130-135.

Abstract

Pulmonary embolism is a very dangerous difficult-to-detect medical condition. To diagnose pulmonary embolism, medical practitioners combine indirect signs of this condition into a single score, and then classify patients into low-probability, intermediate-probability, and high-probability categories. Empirical analysis shows that, when we move from each category to the next one, the probability of pulmonary embolism increases by a factor of three. In this paper, we provide a theoretical explanation for this empirical relation between probabilities.