Hypothesis-driven story building framework: enhancing iterative process support in clinical diagnostic decision support systems.

Clinical diagnosis is an iterative process because of partial and ambiguous information, changing conditions, and resource constraints. Although clinical diagnostic decision support systems have been successfully used to support clinical care, they face certain limitations in supporting clinical diagnosis as an iterative process. An approach is required to enhance the iterative process support in clinical diagnostic decision support systems. We model the clinical diagnosis process as a hypothesis-driven story building, and implement a prototype clinical diagnostic decision support system that is able to generate and evaluate differential diagnoses, narrow and revise the diagnoses based on newly obtained information, and prioritize resources for information seeking.