Abstract
Recent technological advances, particularly those dealing with information acquisition and management, have created opportunities in dental diagnosis and therapy which can be realized fully only through a systematic analysis of all relevant factors. For diagnostic systems, these include: (1) delineation of the task to be accomplished; (2) determination of a rational strategy for sampling pertinent data; and (3) assessment of performance obtainable from real components relative to that produced theoretically by an ideal system operating under the same constraints. The sequence of consideration of these factors is also important, because each is unilaterally constrained by those preceding. The perspective so obtained suggests that future development is likely to be determined more by the conceptualization of problems for which new tools can be designed than by the application of new technology in old ways.
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