Abstract

The safety-critical nature of the application of knowledge-based systems to the field of medicine, demands the adoption of reliable engineering principles with a solid foundation for their construction. Logical languages with their inherent, precise notions of consistency, soundness and completeness offer such a foundation, thus promoting scrutinous engineering of medical knowledge. Moreover, logic techniques provide a powerful means for getting insight into the structure and meaning of medical knowledge used in medical problem solving. Unfortunately, logic is currently only used on a small scale for building practical medical knowledge-based systems. In this paper, the various approaches proposed in the literature are reviewed, and related to different types of knowledge and problem solving employed in the medical field. The appropriateness of logic for building medical knowledge-based expert systems is further motivated.

Citations