Surgery, statistics and science

Mathematics is the fundamental basis of clinical decision making. In medicine, every day of the working life of a doctor is spent evaluating the probability of a diagnosis, estimating benefit of treatment, calculating the risk of harm, and predicting prognosis. As a doctors’ careers progress, clinical decisions are less reliant on textbooks and more on acquisition and synthesis of published evidence (evidence based medicine).

For many doctors, statistics was either not taught or presented from a pure mathematics perspective obscuring the link to medicine. As a result, many excellent clinicians do not recognise the importance of statistics in their clinical practice and have limited ability to evaluate the medical literature. Without a strong foundation, they will struggle to effectively discuss management options and involve patients in clinical decisions in a fast-paced world where applied statistics, coding and artificial intelligence becomes the norm.

In his inaugural lecture, Professor Lim will share how mathematics transformed his career from bewildered medical student to international clinical opinion leader. He will discuss difficulties doctors experience in making clinical decisions and the challenges they face in the interpretation and uptake of new medical information. He will provide views on the limitations of conventional (frequentist) statistics in medicine and the increasing role of artificial intelligence.

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