Supporting Knowledge-Based Decision Making in the Medical Context

Abstract

Knowledge-based clinical decision making is one of the most challenging activities of physicians. Clinical Practice Guidelines are commonly recognized as a useful tool to help physicians in such activities by encoding the indications provided by evidence-based medicine. Computer-based approaches can provide useful facilities to put guidelines into practice and to support physicians in decision-making. Specifically, GLARE (GuideLine Acquisition, Representation and Execution) is a domain-independent prototypical tool providing advanced Artificial Intelligence techniques to support medical decision making, including what-if analysis, temporal reasoning, and decision theory analysis. The paper describes such facilities considering a real-world running example and focusing on the treatment of therapeutic decisions.