Abstract
In this paper, medical diagnosis is viewed as a two-stage process: medical knowledge is first interpreted in a diagnostic sense; next, observed findings are interpreted with respect to this interpreted knowledge and a given hypothesis, yielding a diagnosis. A new set-theoretical framework is introduced that captures this view of diagnosis; it is used to formalize various notions of diagnosis, those proposed in the literature included. Next, a new theory of flexible diagnosis, called refinement diagnosis, is proposed and defined in terms of this framework. Relationships with notions of diagnosis known from the literature are investigated.
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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Lucas, P. (1997). A theory of medical diagnosis as hypothesis refinement. In: Keravnou, E., Garbay, C., Baud, R., Wyatt, J. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. AIME 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1211. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0029449
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0029449
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Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68448-0
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