ABSTRACT
As the ability of modern medicine to provide costly but potentially beneficial treatment grows, the ability to identify patients at high risk of morbidity or mortality correspondingly grows in importance. One area in which the development of interventions is most active is heart disease; in particular, an epoch of special attention is the time following acute myocardial infarction (heart attack). In certain respects the problem of diagnosis may be less difficult than that of making 30-day prognoses, since changes in treatment protocols from one hospital to another and population bases over time probably have less impact on successful diagnoses of heart attacks than on prognoses. The sensitivity of a diagnostic test is the percentage of correctly diagnosed patients from among those who have suffered heart attacks. The specificity is the percentage of correctly diagnosed patients from among those who have not suffered heart attacks.
