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Table 2 Inference methods used in CDSS

From: Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) for preventive management of COPD patients

Method

Description

Implementations

Work-flow driven 1

Logical flows contain statements that reference and manipulate clinical data, usually executed in a serial manner, with control structures that direct the flow of decision making through the procedure.

[23, 24]

Rules-based reasoning 1

Medical knowledge is captured through a collection of IF-THEN expressions. Reasoning by forward chaining (the most common one) links rules together until a conclusion is reached.

[50–52]

Probabilistic reasoning 1,2

Bayesian networks and graphical representation that describes the causal relationships between diseases and symptoms with conditional probabilities.

[53]

Machine learning (ML) 2

Machine learning and statistical techniques, by learning or training, are used on existing, large datasets of clinical data.

[54, 55]

  1. 1Clinical knowledge explicitly modelled
  2. 2Clinical knowledge derived or learnt from data of past cases