A specialized framework for medical diagnostic knowledge-based systems

For a knowledge-based system (KBS) to exhibit an intelligent behavior, it must be endowed with knowledge enabling it to represent the expert's strategies. The elicitation task is inherently difficult for strategic knowledge, because strategy is often tacit, and, even when it has been made explicit, it is not an easy task to describe it in a form which may be directly translated and implemented into a program. This paper describes a Specialized Framework for Medical Diagnostic Knowledge-Based Systems that can help an expert in the process of building KBSs in a medical domain. The framework is based on an epistemological model of diagnostic reasoning which has proven to be helpful in describing the diagnostic process in terms of the tasks that it is composed of. It allows a straightforward modeling of diagnostic reasoning at the knowledge level by the domain expert, thus helping to convey domain-dependent strategies into the target KBS.