We investigate a logical approach to represent medical knowledge, reason deductively and diagnostically. It is suggested that medical knowledge-bases can be formulated as a set of sentences stated in classical logic where each sentence reflects a doct...
We investigate a logical approach to represent medical knowledge, reason deductively and diagnostically. It is suggested that medical knowledge-bases can be formulated as a set of sentences stated in classical logic where each sentence reflects a doctor's knowledge about the human anatomy or his/her view of patient's symptoms. It is also suggested that a form of temporal reasoning can be captured within the same framework because each sentence can have a different truth value based on time. We apply our logical framework to formalize diagnostic reasoning, where the primary cause of illness is chosen among the set of minimal causation on the basis of abductive hypotheses. Most of our examples are given in the context of medical expert systems.