Resolving Conflicts in Clinical Guidelines using Argumentation
  Automatically reasoning with conflicting generic clinical guidelines is a
burning issue in patient-centric medical reasoning where patient-specific
conditions and goals need to be taken into account. It is even more challenging
in the presence of preferences such as patient's wishes and clinician's
priorities over goals. We advance a structured argumentation formalism for
reasoning with conflicting clinical guidelines, patient-specific information
and preferences. Our formalism integrates assumption-based reasoning and
goal-driven selection among reasoning outcomes. Specifically, we assume
applicability of guideline recommendations concerning the generic goal of
patient well-being, resolve conflicts among recommendations using patient's
conditions and preferences, and then consider prioritised patient-centered
goals to yield non-conflicting, goal-maximising and preference-respecting
recommendations. We rely on the state-of-the-art Transition-based Medical
Recommendation model for representing guideline recommendations and augment it
with context given by the patient's conditions, goals, as well as preferences
over recommendations and goals. We establish desirable properties of our
approach in terms of sensitivity to recommendation conflicts and patient
context.
