Cue Combination Types Keywords Artificial Intelligence, diagnosis, decision-support systems, multiple defects, medical informatics. This work describes and refines a computational diagnostic model applicable to problems where multiple defects may be present and where the defects may interact.
Diagnostic problems are common in such diverse areas as medicine, biology, and engineering.
The term defect is used here in the general sense to refer to any type of abnormality we are trying to diagnose. Other terms commonly used for this purpose are diseases and faults . The term cue is used to refer to a piece of data available from a case or data expected to appear for a particular defect. Cases with multiple defects can be much more difficult to diagnose than cases with single defects partially because the number of possible diagnoses increases rapidly when more than one defect can be present. In addition, when more than one defect is present, the defects can interact , meaning that the observable cues are not a sum of the cues observable when the component defects occur individually.