A Knowledge System Architecture for Diagnostic Reasoning

Medical diagnosis can be modelled in terms of the classical notions of abduction, deduction and induction. Abduction is making a preliminary guess that allows to establish a set of plausible diagnostic hypotheses, followed by deduction for exploring their consequences and by induction for testing them with available patient data or for planning the acquisition of new data. Such a description of diagnostic reasoning at a knowledge level helps the construction of an expert system by fashioning the adopted expert system building tool to reflect the structure of the problem rather than force the problem to the tool. For this aim, reasoning strategies need to be represented abstractly, separately from medical facts and relations, in order to make the design more transparent and explainable.