Current trends in medical decision making show awareness of the need to
introduce formal reasoning, as well as intelligent data analysis techniques in the
extraction of knowledge, regularities, trends and representative cases from patient
data stored in medical records. Formal techniques include decision theory and
symbolic reasoning technology , as well as methods at their intersection, such as
probabilistic belief networks. Intelligent data analysis techniques include machine
learning, clustering, data visualization, and interpretation of time-ordered
data (derivation and revision of temporal trends and other forms of temporal data
abstraction).