An Interactive System for Documentation and Analysis of Clinical Discussions

This paper gives an overview of my PhD research that aims to support the clinical decision making scenario by providing a tool that allows documenting and structuring clinical discussions in all the steps of the decision making process, by means of argumentation-based techniques. The goal is to highlight contradicting opinions, to recognize invalid reasoning steps, to discover hidden assumptions, or to identify missing evidences. Indeed, in a clinical discussion, participants make important pieces of knowledge explicit, by presenting different opinions, providing evidences that support hypotheses, and possibly arguing about clinical guidelines. However, this knowledge is often lost after the meeting is closed, since only the final decisions are written in patient records. The approach proposed in this paper aims at overcoming these limitations.