Abstract
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.
One design solution is to use the observation that underlying each of the medical tasks is a process of decision-making which may be represented separately from the details of particular decisions. The user interface may be designed around this process and appear uniform no matter what the area in which a decision is being made. No boundaries need to exist between medical knowledge from different domains.
A five stage symbolic procedure for making decisions is described, in which decision options are proposed, evaluated, and related to one another, with reference to arguments that have been retrieved from the database, or constructed by other forms of reasoning, before the alternatives are ordered. The importance of providing a flexible, open and qualitative decision-making process is stressed, in which the user plays a central role, aware of and able to alter the content and parameters of the procedure.
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© 1989 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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O’Neil, M., Glowinski, A., Fox, J. (1989). A symbolic theory of decision-making applied to several medical tasks. In: Hunter, J., Cookson, J., Wyatt, J. (eds) AIME 89. Lecture Notes in Medical Informatics, vol 38. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-93437-7_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-93437-7_7
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