Comparative Approaches to Medical Reasoning

Book excerpt: This book focuses on approaches to computer-assisted medical decision-making. A unique feature of the book is that a specific problem in medical decision-making has been selected from the literature, with each contributed chapter presenting a different approach to the solution of the same problem. Theoretical foundations for each approach are provided, followed by practical application. Techniques include knowledge-based reasoning, neural network models, hybrid systems, reasoning with uncertainty, and fuzzy logic, among others. The goal is to supply the reader with a variety of theoretical techniques whose practical implementation can be clearly understood through the example. Using a single, concrete example to illustrate different theoretical approaches allows various techniques to be easily contrasted and permits the reader to determine which aspects are pertinent to specific types of applications. Although the methods are illustrated in a medical problem, they have wide applicability in numerous areas of decision-making.