Supporting Medical Discussions Through An Argumentation-Based Tool

The paper presents the interdisciplinary research activity carried out to design ArgMED, an interactive tool devoted to the documentation and analysis of medical discussions. Meetings among different medical specialists take place everyday in every hospital ward in case of difficult diagnoses or rare pathologies. Discussions occurring in such meetings are usually not documented, because physicians prefer to annotate only the final decisions. However, documenting the whole process that leads to a decision is crucial to recall it after sometime and highlight weaknesses, uncertainties and compromises. Argumentation theory, which proved to be suitable to this kind of problems, has been adopted as the basis for ArgMED. The resulting system differentiates from existing proposals in the argumentation field since the user-centered activity that led to its design allowed keeping it closer to the vocabulary and best practices of the considered domain, thus making argumentation a natural process.