Abstract—Mental state examination is an important aspect of
clinical assessment. Clinicians arrive at an overall subjective
diagnostic judgment based on the findings of the mental state
examination. It is largely an implicit process, which clinicians
have learned through their experience, and is therefore, prone
to inconsistencies. This paper presents a formal model for
arriving at expert clinical judgment based on mental state
examination findings, and monitoring the course of illness using
parameters derived using the model. The proposed model has
been implemented as a clinical tool, which is currently being
evaluated in clinical practice. The model has the advantage of
improving the reliability and validity of clinical assessment.
Index Terms—Diagnostic reasoning in psychiatry, modelling
mental state examination in psychiatry, clinical reasoning in
psychiatry, modelling diagnostic reasoning in psychiatry.
D. A. I. P. Fernando is with the School of Electrical Engineering &
Computer Science at the University of Newcastle, NSW 2308, Australia
(e-mail: irosh.fernando@uon.edu.au).
F. A. Henskens is with the Faculty of Engineering & Built Environment,
and Deputy Head of School of the School of Electrical Engineering &
Computer Science, University of Newcastle, NSW 2308, Australia (e-mail:
frans.henskens@newcastle.edu.au).
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Cite:Irosh Fernando and Frans A. Henskens, "Modelling Diagnostic Reasoning Based on Mental State
Examination," International Journal of Modeling and Optimization vol. 3, no. 6, pp. 471-474, 2013.
