What is Qualitative Formalism

This chapter is focused on evaluation of the links between physiology of human body and human emotional states in order to help specialists to perform a correct diagnosis correlated to patient’s expectations and emotional states, as denoted here “the Trust Diagnosis” (TD). The approach in these techniques is different from the previous ones. Instead of observing and classifying the people’s responses to external stimuli or internal emotional factors, the authors are interested in developing a mechanism that appropriately describes the doctor-patient interaction via emotional states caused by disease and/or by doctor’s examination, and that can lead to a TD. The authors intend to develop this approach in two stages: the first stage is focused on emotion models expressed in a qualitative formalism capable to link analytic tools to emotion expressions and deliver significant information for both laboratory analysis methods and doctors’ diagnoses. The second stage is focused on the improvement of the automated medical diagnosis based on biological feature selection and classification, as biological features represent patterns of important information.