Intelligent knowledge retrieval for decision support in medical applications

Knowledge management and retrieval are key issues to be addressed in the medical domain, where a large amount of information is generally available, and where the expert's skills need to be properly shared across the organisation, with the aim of improving the quality of care. Case Based Reasoning (CBR) is a very well suited methodology for the Knowledge Management task, when knowledge is in the operative form. Nevertheless, also well-assessed, formalised medical knowledge, such as clinical guidelines, should be made available to physicians in order to optimise their reasoning process. To take advantage of both knowledge types, we have defined a Multi Modal Reasoning methodology, that integrates CBR and Rule Based Reasoning, for supporting context detection, information retrieval and therapy revision in diabetes care.