Reference: Millis, D. & Shortliffe, E. Integration of Case-Based and Model-Based Approaches for Reasoning about Legal Aspects of Medical Practice. Washington, D.C., 1992.
Abstract: Relatively little time is spent during medical training in helping students learn how to handle the legal problems that arise in medical practice. One way to help fill this gap is to make available computer programs which can aid the student in reasoning about legal concepts. Since much of legal knowledge exists in the form of cases, a problem-solving paradigm often invoked in the legal domain is case-based reasoning, which allow the use of previously solved cases to generate solutions to new problems when there is no well-defined theory of how to solve problems in the domain. Recent studies have explored the use of model-based reasoning to strengthen the ability of a case-based reasoner to identify relevant similarities among cases and to justify the plausibility of solutions adapted from previous cases. However, model-based reasoning traditonally presupposes a well-defined theory of the domain. In this paper we explore the use of informal or nondeterminstic models to aid a case-based reasoner in the process of problem solving. We have found that there is a degree of synergy between case-based and model-based reasoning that allows each to overcome some of the weaknesses of the other when a system must reason in nondeterministic domains.