The Role of Prototypical Cases in Biomedical Case-Based Reasoning

Abstract

Representing biomedical knowledge is an essential task in biomedical informatics intelligent systems. Case-based reasoning (CBR) holds the promise of representing contextual knowledge in a way that was not possible before with traditional knowledge representation and knowledge-based methods. A main issue in biomedical CBR has been dealing with maintenance of the case base, and particularly in medical domains, with the rate of generation of new knowledge, which often makes the content of a case base partially obsolete. This article proposes to make use of the concept of prototypical case to ensure that a CBR system would keep up-to-date with current research advances in the biomedical field. It proposes to illustrate and discuss the different roles that prototypical cases can serve in biomedical CBR systems, among which to organize and structure the memory, to guide the retrieval as well as the reuse of cases, and to serve as bootstrapping a CBR system memory when real cases are not available in sufficient quantity and/or quality. This paper presents knowledge maintenance as another role that these prototypical cases can play in biomedical CBR systems.