Model-based reasoning in biomedicine

Significant advances have been achieved in model-based reasoning in the past decade, rendering it one of the most active branches of artificial intelligence. Research on model-based reasoning focuses on two major goals: being able to predict and explain device behavior, mostly using qualitative representations. Viewed from the same perspective, many research issues in biomedicine share the same outlook: being able to predict the behavior of a certain biological system, and being able to explain why the system behaves as it does (or will behave as it is predicted to). Qualitative modeling, with its wide margins for ambiguity, provides an excellent toolset for the simulation of biological systems which do not lend themselves easily to mathematical modeling. This article presents a review of recent advances in model-based reasoning in biomedicine.