AIDS Imaging and Evidence Based Medicine

Abstract

Evidence based medicine (EBM) is a concept combining clinicians’ personal professional knowledge, the optimal clinical evidence available, and the choice of patients to guide clinical practice and make the best clinical decision. The core idea of EBM is to seriously and cautiously apply the latest and optimal information gained from clinical studies to diagnose and treat patients. The three fundamental factors of EBM are to seek, evaluate and correctly use evidence. The significance and necessity of evidence in decision-making is emphasized. The rapid development of new techniques and methods of modern medical imaging provides more and more information for clinical practice. The symptoms of AIDS patients are complex, usually with involvements of multiple systems, multiple organs, and diverse pathogens simultaneously or successively. Therefore, the diagnosis of AIDS patients depends on various investigations, in which diagnostic imaging is the primary method to obtain clinical evidence. How to start from clinical symptoms to select appropriate diagnostic imaging methods for persuasive evidence of HIV/AIDS is a new subject for radiologists. The method and thinking way of EBM offers essential reference for HIV/AIDS imaging in clinical practice.