Evidence-based medicine and radiology

Abstract

In the early 1990's, a group of physician-epidemiologists developed ways of efficiently tracking down and appraising literature and wrote them up in order to help other doctors, with no or with minimal formal epidemiological training. Today Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) integrates clinical experience and patient values with the best available research information in order to expand research evidence and to provide sensible answers to medical questions in clinical decision making. Although EBM does not provide the answer to every clinical question, it provides us valuable additional evidence helpful in decision making. EBM process includes five steps: answerable questions asking; accessing for the best information; information appraisal for validity and relevance; data application to patient care and finally evaluation of the performance. The purpose of this paper is to help radiologists who have no postgraduate specialist training in research to become familiar with EBM and to find solutions that are based on best current evidence for problems arising in their practice.