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.

Contents: Introduction and Memorial Session: Decision Support in Medicine. Comparative Methodology and Impact on the Medical Curriculum.- Special Topic Contributions: Decision Support in Western Clinical Medicine. Decision Support in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Knowledge-Based Systems and Statistical Decision Support. Clinical Studies and Decision Support. Informatics as Applied to Expert Systems. Experiences with Expert Systems. Data Bases and Expert Systems. Future Trends and Possibilities.- Free Contributions: Statistical and Laboratory Animals Methods/Statistische und Tierexperimentelle Verfahren. Medical Documentation and Information Systems/Medizinsche Dokumentations- und Informationssysteme. Systems for Intensive Care Medicine/Rechnergestützte Intensivpflege. Image Processing/Bildverarbeitung.- Software-Demonstration.- Author Index.- Subject Index.