A Hierarchical Agent Decision Support Model and Its Clinical Application

In this paper, a hierarchical agent decision support model is proposed. The model helps to provide multifaceted decision support: grouping of specialist towards complex problems at the organisational level, planning and argumentation at the individual level, and service binding at the computational level. The approach includes an agent scheme, a conceptual decision model, and a set of functional signatures that drive the decision inference, accompanied with algorithms that guide their implementation. The model is specially designed to be adaptive. A clinical application of triple assessment of breast cancer is used for illustration.