Incorporating Probabilistic Knowledge in HealthAgents: a Conceptual Graph Approach.

HealthAgents is a multi-agent, distributed decision support system for brain tumor diagnosis. Knowledge needs to be shared amongst different agents in order to assist clinicians when making diagnosis / prognosis. Existing terminological standards led to the development of a vocabulary to facilitate interoperability. Querying expressivity requirements as well as the need for visual capabilities further led to the development of a Conceptual Graph based description of the data sources: knowledge oriented specification. However, an important part of the medical knowledge is not encoded in this formalism: background knowledge regarding statistical correlations. As a decision support system, HealthAgents should provide the clinician all possible related information about a case. This paper presents a way of encoding and utilising such statistical information. The Simple Conceptual Graphs that describe a given hospital cases will be used to retrieve related information. Logical subsumption will be used for retrieval, while the statistical correlations will be presented to the clinician as part of the decision support system.