From vagueness in medical thought to the foundations of fuzzy reasoning in medical diagnosis

OBJECTIVE: This article delineates a relatively unknown path in the history of medical philosophy and medical diagnosis. It is concerned with the phenomenon of vagueness in the physician's "style of thinking" and with the use of fuzzy sets, systems, and relations with a view to create a model of such reasoning when physicians make a diagnosis. It represents specific features of medical ways of thinking that were mentioned by the Polish physician and philosopher Ludwik Fleck in 1926. The paper links Lotfi Zadeh's work on system theory before the age of fuzzy sets with system-theory concepts in medical philosophy that were introduced by the philosopher Mario Bunge, and with the fuzzy-theoretical analysis of the notions of health, illness, and disease by the Iranian-German physician and philosopher Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh. MATERIAL: Some proposals to apply fuzzy sets in medicine were based on a suggestion made by Zadeh: symptoms and diseases are fuzzy in nature and fuzzy sets are feasible to represent these entity classes of medical knowledge. Yet other attempts to use fuzzy sets in medicine were self-contained. The use of this approach contributed to medical decision-making and the development of computer-assisted diagnosis in medicine. CONCLUSION: With regard to medical philosophy, decision-making, and diagnosis; the framework of fuzzy sets, systems, and relations is very useful to deal with the absence of sharp boundaries of the sets of symptoms, diagnoses, and phenomena of diseases. The foundations of reasoning and computer assistance in medicine were the result of a rapid accumulation of data from medical research. This explosion of knowledge in medicine gave rise to the speculation that computers could be used for the medical diagnosis. Medicine became, to a certain extent, a quantitative science. In the second half of the 20th century medical knowledge started to be stored in computer systems. To assist physicians in medical decision-making and patient care, medical expert systems using the theory of fuzzy sets and relations (such as the Viennese "fuzzy version" of the Computer-Assisted Diagnostic System, CADIAG, which was developed at the end of the 1970s) were constructed. The development of fuzzy relations in medicine and their application in computer-assisted diagnosis show that this fuzzy approach is a framework to deal with the "fuzzy mode of thinking" in medicine.