Medical error poses an important healthcare burden and a challenge for physicians and policy makers worldwide. Diagnostic error accounts for a substantial fraction of all medical mistakes. Most diagnostic errors have been associated with flaws in clinical reasoning. Empirical evidence on the cognitive mechanisms underlying such flaws and effectiveness of strategies to counteract them is scarce....

Background Diagnostic reasoning refers to the cognitive processes by which clinicians formulate diagnoses. Despite the implications for patient safety and professional identity, research on diagnostic reasoning in osteopathy remains largely theoretical. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of perceived task difficulty on the diagnostic reasoning of students osteopaths. Metho...

In many diagnosis-and-repair domains, diagnostic reasoning cannot be abstracted from repair actions, nor from actions necessary to obtain diagnostic information. We call these exploratory-corrective domains. In TraumAID 2.0, a consultation system for multiple trauma management, we have developed and implemented a framework for reasoning in such domains which integrates diagnostic reasoning with...

Several recent books have addressed " How Doctors Think, " with emphasis on diagnostic decision making and the sources of diagnostic error. National venues now target the problem of diagnostic error and new studies highlight the high levels of costly and unnecessary test ordering, much of which is related to ineffective diagnostic processes. And, finally, teaching clinical reasoning is still co...

The occupational therapy process involves the assessment and treatment of problems in occupational status. Assessment entails the sensing and defining of patients' problems and is accomplished through diagnosis. As a process, diagnosis involves the creation of a clinical image of the patient through cue acquisition, hypothesis generation, cue interpretation, and hypothesis evaluation. This sequ...

The feasibility of diagnostic reasoning in a Bayesian belief network, based on a genetic algorithm is demonstrated. The reasoning process described here is an example of approximate reasoning. Since exact abduction in a network modelling the "classical diagnostic problem" is NP-hard, inexact or approximate reasoning attracts much attention. The results of the present study indicate that in a gi...

Associative and causal reasoning accounts are probably the two most influential types of accounts of causal reasoning processes. Only causal reasoning accounts predict certain asymmetries between predictive (i.e., reasoning from causes to effects) and diagnostic (i.e., reasoning from effects to causes) inferences regarding cue-interaction phenomena (e.g., the overshadowing effect). In the exper...

This paper reports on a study investigating the relationship of nursing students' approaches to learning and processing of information, science content knowledge, ability in interpreting and organizing clinical data (nursing assessment), and logical reasoning ability with the accuracy and quality of the nursing diagnosis made in a simulated diagnostic reasoning task. One hundred and sixty-nine ...