Trustworthy Clinical Decision Support Using Meta-Predicates and Domain-Specific Languages

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Main Authors: Bouzinier, Michael, Trifonov, Sergey, Chumack, Michael, Lvova, Eugenia, Etin, Dmitry
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Bouzinier, Michael
Trifonov, Sergey
Chumack, Michael
Lvova, Eugenia
Etin, Dmitry
author_facet Bouzinier, Michael
Trifonov, Sergey
Chumack, Michael
Lvova, Eugenia
Etin, Dmitry
contents \textbf{Background:} Regulatory frameworks for AI in healthcare, including the EU AI Act and FDA guidance on AI/ML-based medical devices, require clinical decision support to demonstrate not only accuracy but auditability. Existing formal languages for clinical logic validate syntactic and structural correctness but not whether decision rules use epistemologically appropriate evidence. \textbf{Methods:} Drawing on design-by-contract principles, we introduce meta-predicates -- predicates about predicates -- for asserting epistemological constraints on clinical decision rules expressed in a DSL. An epistemological type system classifies annotations along four dimensions: purpose, knowledge domain, scale, and method of acquisition. Meta-predicates assert which evidence types are permissible in any given rule. The framework is instantiated in AnFiSA, an open-source platform for genetic variant curation, and demonstrated using the Brigham Genomics Medicine protocol on 5.6 million variants from the Genome in a Bottle benchmark. \textbf{Results:} Decision trees used in variant interpretation can be reformulated as unate cascades, enabling per-variant audit trails that identify which rule classified each variant and why. Meta-predicate validation catches epistemological errors before deployment, whether rules are human-written or AI-generated. The approach complements post-hoc methods such as LIME and SHAP: where explanation reveals what evidence was used after the fact, meta-predicates constrain what evidence may be used before deployment, while preserving human readability. \textbf{Conclusions:} Meta-predicate validation is a step toward demonstrating not only that decisions are accurate but that they rest on appropriate evidence in ways that can be independently audited. While demonstrated in genomics, the approach generalises to any domain requiring auditable decision logic.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_21263
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Trustworthy Clinical Decision Support Using Meta-Predicates and Domain-Specific Languages
Bouzinier, Michael
Trifonov, Sergey
Chumack, Michael
Lvova, Eugenia
Etin, Dmitry
Artificial Intelligence
Programming Languages
Software Engineering
Quantitative Methods
68N15, 68N30, 92D10
D.3.2; D.2.4; D.2.1; J.3
\textbf{Background:} Regulatory frameworks for AI in healthcare, including the EU AI Act and FDA guidance on AI/ML-based medical devices, require clinical decision support to demonstrate not only accuracy but auditability. Existing formal languages for clinical logic validate syntactic and structural correctness but not whether decision rules use epistemologically appropriate evidence. \textbf{Methods:} Drawing on design-by-contract principles, we introduce meta-predicates -- predicates about predicates -- for asserting epistemological constraints on clinical decision rules expressed in a DSL. An epistemological type system classifies annotations along four dimensions: purpose, knowledge domain, scale, and method of acquisition. Meta-predicates assert which evidence types are permissible in any given rule. The framework is instantiated in AnFiSA, an open-source platform for genetic variant curation, and demonstrated using the Brigham Genomics Medicine protocol on 5.6 million variants from the Genome in a Bottle benchmark. \textbf{Results:} Decision trees used in variant interpretation can be reformulated as unate cascades, enabling per-variant audit trails that identify which rule classified each variant and why. Meta-predicate validation catches epistemological errors before deployment, whether rules are human-written or AI-generated. The approach complements post-hoc methods such as LIME and SHAP: where explanation reveals what evidence was used after the fact, meta-predicates constrain what evidence may be used before deployment, while preserving human readability. \textbf{Conclusions:} Meta-predicate validation is a step toward demonstrating not only that decisions are accurate but that they rest on appropriate evidence in ways that can be independently audited. While demonstrated in genomics, the approach generalises to any domain requiring auditable decision logic.
title Trustworthy Clinical Decision Support Using Meta-Predicates and Domain-Specific Languages
topic Artificial Intelligence
Programming Languages
Software Engineering
Quantitative Methods
68N15, 68N30, 92D10
D.3.2; D.2.4; D.2.1; J.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21263