Dynamic Influence Diagrams: Applications to Medical Decision Modeling.

Influence diagrams are now a well established tool for modeling in decision analysis. Recently, dynamic influence diagrams have been applied to help structure stochastic processes. This chapter discusses dynamic influence diagrams for structuring continuous-time Markov chains, with particular focus on medical decision modeling. We describe our freely available Excel-based software package StoTree, in which dynamic influence diagram models may be readily formulated and solved. We present medical applications as examples, including a previously published cost-effectiveness analysis for total hip replacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]