Merging declarative and procedural representations in acid-base diagnosis

ANABEL (ANalysis of Acid-Base status by Evaluating Lisp) is a prototype decision-support system aiming to help clinicians in an intensive therapy unit with the interpretation of patients´ blood-gas measurements. It is based on an architecture which combines representations for declarative as well as procedural medical knowledge. The system mimics human cognitive processes by synthetic reasoning whereby elementary forms of procedural knowledge are evaluated and their symbolic outputs abstracted in generating text. Thus, a semantic trace is built which reflects the system´s line of reasoning in reaching a suggestion for a valid diagnosis.<>