TMD's, as a cluster of individual diseases and disorders, pose new intellectual challenges to the diagnostic skills of dentists. New technologies enable dentists to avail themselves of paraclinical data such that diagnosis can and should be disease specific or etiology specific. The importance of logic in diagnostic reasoning is discussed. Studies of the reasoning process of doctors with reputa...

This position paper argues that causal explanation in diagnostic tasks are more easily achieved in fault-based or failure-driven reasoning versus model-based reasoning. Faultbased or failure-driven diagnosis is more of a contextual task and can more easily be used to support user interaction through explanation than model-based diagnosis. A problem with fault-based reasoning that is often cited...

QUESTION What are the key items in the clinical reasoning process which expert clinicians identify as being relevant to the assessment and management of patients with shoulder pain? DESIGN Qualitative study using a three-round Delphi procedure. PARTICIPANTS Twenty-six experts in the UK consented to be involved and were contactable, of whom 20 contributed, with 12, 15, and 15 contributing to...

In diagnostic reasoning, knowledge about symptoms and their likely causes is retrieved to generate and update diagnostic hypotheses in memory. By letting participants learn about causes and symptoms in a spatial array, we could apply eye tracking during diagnostic reasoning to trace the activation level of hypotheses across a sequence of symptoms and to evaluate process models of diagnostic rea...

This paper reports on a collaboration between two research groups. The first group has studied Formalization of ANaesthesia knowledge (FAN). An aim in the knowledge formalization was support of diagnosis, but the diagnostic method to be used was itself not formalized at the time. The second group has developed a general framework for diagnostic reasoning. The framework is parametrized to accoun...

In the field of diagnostic reasoning, it has been argued that memory activation can provide the reasoner with a subset of possible explanations from memory that is highly adaptive for the task at hand. However, few studies have experimentally tested this assumption. Even less empirical and theoretical work has investigated how newly incoming observations affect the availability of explanations ...

Whilst it is clear that experienced clinicians adopt a rational approach of diagnosis, the logic of their clinical reasoning has been difficult to define. I outline here an approach based on the four categories of a complete diagnosis: Anatomical diagnosis (system involved); Pathological diagnosis (nature of the condition); Physiological diagnosis (functional consequences) and Aetiological diag...

The paper by Gurova takes issue with the claim of Meehl that ‘understanding makes it normal’ is a fallacy in diagnostic reasoning [1,2]. Her paper prompts the more general question of appropriate methods for testing whether a specific way of reasoning in making a clinical diagnosis is fallacious. So prompted, I will compare the methods that the Gurova paper deploys with some of requirements for...