Experiences with prototype designs and retrieval methods in medical Case-Based Reasoning systems

In the recent years we have developed three medical Case-Based Reasoning systems for diagnosis of dysmorphic syndromes, for antibiotics therapy advice and for course analysis and prognosis of the kidney function. In this paper we summarise our experience with these medical CBR applications. Special focuses are on the retrieval methods and on the importance and the design of typical cases (prototypes) which we use as a knowledge generalisation step to fill the gap between single cases and general knowledge.