ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a proposed representation of medical knowledge. It describes the operators that manipulate and build the representation, and presents some ideas on how diagnostic problem-solving proceeds using these data. To explore in depth the representations and reasoning strategies needed for thorough medical reasoning, it is useful to choose carefully some specific domain of medical application that poses just the right challenges. The objective of a program in the diagnostic and treatment domain is "the proper management of the patient." That proper management consists of collecting the relevant information about the patient, identifying the disease process(es) responsible for the patient's illness, and prescribing a proper course of action to correct the patient's condition. The primary responsibility of the program is to make the proper diagnosis. Without fulfilling this criterion, the program offers little possibility of being clinically useful.
