A symbolic theory of decision-making applied to several medical tasks

The variety of a general practitioner’s caseload suggests that a very large scale knowledge-based system is required, in which medical tasks such as diagnosis, investigation, screening, treatment planning, prescribing and referral are all represented. However simply to glue together many small scale ‘expert systems’ would lead to a profusion of user interfaces, unpredictable interactions between the knowledge-bases and difficulty in coping with cases which fall between medical fields.