Defeasible Reasoning and Argument-Based Systems in Medical Fields: An Informal Overview

The first aim of this article is to provide readers informally with the basic notions of defeasible and non-monotonic reasoning, logics borrowed from artificial intelligence. It then describes argumentation theory, a paradigm for implementing defeasible reasoning in practice as well as the common multi-layer schema upon which argument-based models are usually built. The second aim is to describe the selection of argument-based applications in the medical and health-care sectors. Finally, the paper will conclude with a summary of the features, which make defeasible reasoning and argumentation theory attractive, that emerge from the applications under review. The target reader is a medical or health-care practitioner, with limited skills in formal knowledge representation and logic, interested in enhancing evidence modelling and aggregation.