Measuring inconsistent diagnoses

Abstract

When visiting a hospital and seeking for answers for their symptoms, many people face contradictory diagnoses given by different physicians. This may happen either because they exhibit symptoms that are common to several diseases or because the symptoms are themselves misleading. In some cases, complementary methods of diagnostic are needed for further discussion. However, sometimes, not even those are the solution for an infallible diagnosis.By resorting to multimodal hybrid logic in a setting where inconsistencies are allowed, we introduce an informal example about the path of a patient in a hospital, where we keep information about his symptoms and diagnoses until being discharged. Our goal is the establishment of a measure of inconsistency, so that one can get a sense on the quality of the treatment given to the patient. By gathering a sufficient amount of information about patients in a hospital, those measures could be of help in determining the efficiency of the hospital. This is a critical issue, as it is well-known that early diagnoses are superbly desirable and can be life-changing.