The 33rd Annual Meeting of the German Association for Medical Documentation, Informatics and Statistics was combined with a Special Topic Conference of the European Federation for Medical Informatics and takes place at Hannover, F. R. of Germany, from September 26 to 29, 1988. It was planned and initililly prepared by the late Prof. P. L Reichertz, who headed the Hannover institute from 1969 to 1987. To commemorate his contribution to the development of medicine the conference was devoted to him "Peter Reichertz Memorial Conference on Expert Systems and Decision Support in Medicine" Since computers in the early Fifties were first applied to support medical reasoning, various phases of euphoria and resi~ation have. followed. Every new methodology which became technically possible was and will be applied to the old questlon of how to diagnose diseases more reliably. Artificial Intelligence is just one new approach to the old challenge. Over the years some· authors have been very optimistic and put forward opinions which motivated the common press to coin the phrase 'Dr. med. computer'. Papers printed under this heading rebuffed the majority of physiCians for many years. Today we know that medical decision making is a most complex buman performance. And 30 years of research on decision support have given us only limited insight into the underlying processes. Most of the principal methodological questions were already asked very early on.

Inhaltsangabeand Memorial Session.- Decision Support in Medicine Comparative Methodology and Impact on the Medical Curriculum.- Special Topic Contributions.- Decision Support in Western Clinical Medicine.- Medical Practice - Decision Making: A Logical Model.- New Decision Support Concepts for the Pharmacy Application in the HELP System.- ROPES - A Rule-Based Outpatient Expert System.- DIACONS - A Consultation System to Assist in the Management of Diabetes.- Using Default Reasoning to Find Interactions of Drugs.- Decision Support for Cardiac Care Unit Admission - Evaluation of Methodological Approaches in Relation to Clinical Applicability.- MESSE - A Medical Expert System of Special Examinations.- Decision Support System in Oncology.- A Computer-Aided Diagnosis System for Lung Cancer.- Medical Diagnosis by Negotiation Amongst Experts.- Aiding Medical Inferences by the Relational Rules Acquired from Medical Experts; Consultation System for Use in a Gynecologic Out-Patient Clinic.- Decision Support in Traditional Chinese Medicine.- Principles of Developing Expert Systems of Traditional Chinese Medicine.- Computer Simulation System on Diagnosing and Treating Hypertension by Traditional Chinese Medicine Associated with Modern Medicine.- An Expert System for Diagnosing and Treating Ectopic Pregnancy with Combined Traditional Chinese and Western Medicines.- Knowledge-Based Systems and Statistical Decision Support.- Statistical Reasoning and Learning in Knowledge-bases Represented as Causal Networks.- The Use of the Diagnostic Paradigm in Modelling Medical Decision Making.- The Computer-Aided Differential Diagnosis of Diseases of the Urinary Tract in Children.- Qualitative Modelling in Vascular Surgery.- Statistical Approach to the Acute Abdomen Diagnosis in Children.- A Probabilistic Approach to Health Care Delivery in Tropical Africa.- A New Approach to the Solution of Decision Making Problems in Medical Expert Systems.- Computer-Assisted Construction of Conceptual Frameworks for Health Systems Research.- Clinical Studies and Decision Support.- A Strategy for Identifying Clusters of Similar Response.- Error Rate Estimation in Discriminant Analysis in the Presence of Variable Selection.- Assessment of the Diagnostic Importance of BAL-Fluid Values with ROC-Curves.- Scoring Systems and Computer-Aided Prognosis in Patients with Bleeding Oesophageal or Gastric Varices.- On the Use of Statistical Expert Systems for Supporting Quality Assurance in Analysis of Clinical Trials.- Informatics as Applied to Expert Systems.- An Expert System for Interpretation and Diagnosis of ECG Signals.- An Expert System for Genetic Counseling.- MECOS-2: An Artificial Intelligence Tool System for Developing Medical Expert Systems in Various Subjects.- Diagnostic Expert Systems in Neurology - A Comparison between a Rule Based Prototype and a Database Oriented Approach.- Prediction of MSOF Evolution by Means of Nine Vital Systems Trajectories.- An Expert System for Cardiopulmonary Diseases in Primary Health Care.- Experiences with Expert Systems.- Knowledge-Based Decision Support for Laryngeal Tumor Diseases: Design and Structure of the ESTHER System.- An Expert System for Diagnosis and Therapy Planning in Patients with Ovarian Cancer.- Electrolyte and Haemostasis Test Interpretation by Expert Systems on Microcomputer in Medical Laboratory.- Representation of Neuroanatomical Knowledge by PROLOG.- Knowledge-Based Decision Support for Monitoring in Anesthesia: Problems, Design and User Interaction.- Shock Trauma Manual Computer Consultation Expert System.- An Expert System for Medical Evacuations.- A Computer Oriented Diagnosis of Acute Renal Failure in the Critically III Patient.- Decision Support in Medical Management of Personnel Resources: Duty Roster in an Anesthesiologic Department.- Computer-Aided Diagnosis: Experience with Knowledge Based Methods.- A Commonly Used Expert System of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).- On the Assessment of Medical Expert Systems.- Data