Spatial reasoning based on multivariate belief functions

The authors propose knowledge representation and evidence propagation schemes based on multivariate belief functions and present a medical image recognition system to demonstrate the effectiveness of their application to spatial reasoning. The proposed system, which is based on the blackboard architecture, can mimic the reasoning process of a human expert in identifying the anatomical structures in a set of correlated images acquired from X-ray CT and PD- and T₂ -weighted MRI. In the blackboard-oriented system, different kinds of evidence provided by various knowledge sources form a hierarchy of evidential space to which the Dempster-Shafer theory is applied. The multivariate belief functions are used to represent domain specific knowledge such as rules or facts