Diagnosis support system based on clinical guidelines: comparison between case-based fuzzy cognitive maps and Bayesian networks.

Several studies have described the prevalence and severity of diagnostic errors. Diagnostic errors can arise from cognitive, training, educational and other issues. Examples of cognitive issues include flawed reasoning, incomplete knowledge, faulty information gathering or interpretation, and inappropriate use of decision-making heuristics. We describe a new approach, case-based fuzzy cognitive maps, for medical diagnosis and evaluate it by comparison with Bayesian belief networks. We created a semantic web framework that supports the two reasoning methods. We used database of 174 anonymous patients from several European hospitals: 80 of the patients were female and 94 male with an average age 45±16 (average±stdev). Thirty of the 80 female patients were pregnant. For each patient, signs/symptoms/observables/age/sex were taken into account by the system. We used a statistical approach to compare the two methods.