DOI:
Abstract:
In this paper we argue that given a body of underlying knowledge that is relevant to diagnostic reasoning in a medical domain, it is possible to create a diagnostic structure which has all the relevant aspects of the underlying knowledge "compiled" into it in such a way that all the diagnostic problems in its scope can be solved efficiently, without, generally speaking, any need to access the underlying structures. We indicate what such a diagnostic structure might look like by reference to our medical diagnostic system MDX. We also analyze the role of these knowledge structures in providing explanations of diagnostic reasoning.