Our research examines the normative and descriptive adequacy of alternative computational models of diagnostic reasoning from single effects to single causes. Many theories of diagnostic reasoning are based on the normative assumption that inferences from an effect to its cause should reflect solely the empirically observed conditional probability of cause given effect. We argue against this as...

Optimal medical care is critically dependent on clinicians' skills to make the right diagnosis and to recommend the most appropriate therapy, and acquiring such reasoning skills is a key requirement at every level of medical education. Teaching clinical reasoning is grounded in several fundamental principles of educational theory. Adult learning theory posits that learning is best accomplished ...

In this paper we argue that given a body of underlying knowledge that is relevant to diagnostic reasoning in a medical domain, it is possible to create a diagnostic structure which has all the relevant aspects of the underlying knowledge "compiled" into it in such a way that all the diagnostic problems in its scope can be solved efficiently, without, generally speaking, any need to access the u...