Complementary case-based reasoning and competitive fuzzy cognitive maps for advanced medical decisions

This paper presents a new hybrid modeling methodology suitable for complex decision making processes. It extends previous work on competitive fuzzy cognitive maps for medical decision support systems by complementing them with case based reasoning methods. The synergy of these methodologies is accomplished by a new proposed algorithm that leads to more dependable advanced medical decision support systems that are suitable to handle situations where the decisions are not clearly distinct. The methodology developed here is applied successfully to model and test two decision support systems, one a differential diagnosis problem from the speech pathology area for the diagnosis of language impairments and the other for decision making choices in external beam radiation therapy.