Heuristic Reasoning Services for Medical Environments

This paper describes a conceptual framework for facilitating the modelling and development of heuristic reasoning services in clinical domains. The purpose of this framework is to provide support for 1) the representation of medical knowledge in a structured manner, 2) the design of clinical tasks such as diagnosis, therapy planning and patient monitoring, 3) providing some type of facilities for the implementation of these clinical tasks, and 4) making available its use on the web. In order to adequately achieve all these objectives, our approach is oriented to configure heuristic reasoning services, by reusing generic knowledge components, such as clinical domain ontologies and models or problemsolving methods. Currently, an engineering framework, KEAM (Knowledge Engineering Applied to Medicine), based on this approach is being implemented.