Argumentation schemes for clinical decision support

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how argumentation schemes can be used in decision support systems that help clinicians in making treatment decisions. The work builds on the use of computational argumentation, a rigorous approach to reasoning with complex data that places strong emphasis on being able to justify and explain the decisions that are recommended. The main contribution of the paper is to present a novel set of specialised argumentation schemes that can be used in the context of a clinical decision support system to assist in reasoning about what treatments to offer. These schemes provide a mechanism for capturing clinical reasoning in such a way that it can be handled by the formal reasoning mechanisms of formal argumentation. The paper describes how the integration between argumentation schemes and formal argumentation may be carried out, sketches how this is achieved by an implementation that we have created and illustrates the overall process on a small set of case studies.

Reasoning and interaction for social artificial intelligence

“…Also addressing the knowledge engineering challenge, Modgil's work considers the development of argument schemes and critical questions (AsCq) specialised for different domains, including organ transplant coordination and medical reasoning more generally (e.g., [86,92]). Argument schemes are stereotypical patterns of reasoning, which are used as presumptive justification for generating arguments.…”

“…After all, more complex reasoning tasks, such as those that involve managing uncertainty and resolving conflicts, often benefit from input and insights elicited from multiple agents engaged in the dialogical exchange of locutions. Hence, non-monotonic logics • Knowledge representation, reasoning, and engineering, including: development of both structured and abstract argumentation frameworks and argumentative (dialectical) formalisations of non-monotonic logics that comply with rational principles regarding the handling of uncertainty and resolution of conflict (e.g., [22-24, 35, 36, 39, 60, 65, 67, 68, 73, 99]); proof theories and algorithms for reasoning with and about arguments (e.g., [66,[78][79][80]; specification of argument schemes specialised to particular domains (e.g., [86,92]); argument mining approaches for identifying arguments and relations between arguments from text (e.g., [16,18]). • Dialogical argumentation, including: systems for distributed inquiry over beliefs and for distributed deliberation over actions (e.g., [4,6]); how an agent can act strategically so as to influence the outcome of dialogical argumentation, taking into account what it believes to be true about its interlocutor's private mental state (e.g., [5,41,46,69]).…”

EQRbot: A chatbot delivering EQR argument-based explanations

“…In Shaheen et al (2021), the authors introduce the Explain Argument Scheme, which models explanations based on the reasons, types (of reasons) and levels (of abstraction) and shows a (pro or con) rationale for giving a particular drug to a patient. The work presented in Sassoon et al (2019), Kökciyan et al (2020), andSassoon et al (2021) harnesses Explanation Templates that differ according to the reasoning and argument scheme represented and include placeholders for the actual instantiated variables specific to a given application of the scheme. Formally: Definition 2 (Argument Scheme).…”

“…In order for a cDSS to provide the appropriate medical suggestions, explanation templates have previously been mapped to the Argument Scheme for Proposed Treatment (ASPT) (Sassoon et al, 2019(Sassoon et al, , 2021Kökciyan et al, 2020). Introduced in Kokciyan et al (2018), ASPT derives from the Argument Scheme for Practical Reasoning as presented in Atkinson and Bench-Capon (2007).…”

“…(EQR.CQ10) Would acting upon α promote a negative value? Following an approach akin to Sassoon et al (2021), we can model each of the above critical questions into corresponding argument schemes. Each of these additional argument schemes may have its respective critical questions.…”