Rule - Based Model for Medical Knowledge Presentation and Reasoning in Clinical Decision Support Systems

The two core components of every clinical decision support system (CDSS), which are crucial for the success of the system, are the knowledge base and the reasoning engine. A great deal of the artificial intelligence research has focused on determining the appropriate knowledge representation and reasoning methods to achieve high performance of the knowledge-based systems. This paper proposes a model for medical knowledge presentation and reasoning, which is used in a clinical decision support system for managing asthma in school-aged children. To promote customization and flexibility, we use rules for formal presentation and reasoning of the general asthma related knowledge and the individual patient specific facts. This paper contributes to the medical informatics research by demonstrating an effective method for knowledge presentation and reasoning in a specific clinical decision support system, which can also be applied to similar systems.