Fuzzy cognitive maps for medical decision support - a paradigm from obstetrics.

Medical Decision Support Systems can provide assistance in crucial clinical judgments, particularly for inexperienced medical professionals. Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) is a soft computing technique for modeling complex systems following an approach similar to human reasoning and decision-making. FCMs successfully represent knowledge and human experience, introducing concepts to represent the essential elements and the cause and effect relationships among the concepts to model the behavior of any system. Medical Decision Systems are complex systems that can be decomposed to subsystems and elements, where many factors have to be taken into consideration that may be complementary, contradictory, and competitive; these factors influence each other and determine the overall clinical decision with varying degrees. Here a Medical Decision Support System based on an appropriate FCM architecture is proposed and developed, as well as a corresponding paradigm from obstetrics is described.