A Proposal for a Computational Model of Anatomical and Physiological Reasoning

Abstract

The studies of anatomy and physiology are fundamental ingredients of medical education. This paper identifies six ways in which such functional knowledge serves as the underpinnings for general medical reasoning, and outlines the design of a computational model of common sense reasoning about human physiology. The design of the proposed model is grounded in a set of declarative representational ideas sometimes called "frame theory": representational structures constructed from multiple-perspective, potentially redundant, descriptions, organized into structured collections, and associated with the objects and classes being described.