Model against unnecessary use of antibiotics

Patients in intensive care units (ICU) are often administered antibiotics against ventilator-associated pneumonia, 'to be on the safe side'. Dutch researcher Stefan Visscher has developed a model that can quickly establish whether or not a patient has pneumonia. This can prevent unnecessary treatment with antibiotics.
In his thesis Stefan Visscher studied 238 cases of antibiotic treatment of which - with hindsight - only 157 patients were actually suffering from pneumonia. An absence of suitable patient-friendly tests makes it difficult to determine with certainty whether or not a patient has developed pneumonia.
Visscher developed and tested a Bayesian network model, a probabilistic model, that can distinguish between patients that do and do not have ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP). His model calculates the probability that an individual patient is suffering from pneumonia, predicts which bacteria has caused it and indicates which antibiotic can best be prescribed. This method is more reliable than the cultures on which physicians currently base their decisions. The data needed to make the probability calculations are automatically retrieved from the electronic patient file.