A Logic-Based Framework Leveraging Neural Networks for Studying the Evolution of Neurological Disorders

Deductive formalisms have been strongly developed in recent years; among them, answer set programming (ASP) gained some momentum and has been lately fruitfully employed in many real-world scenarios. Nonetheless, in spite of a large number of success stories in relevant application areas, and even in industrial contexts, deductive reasoning cannot be considered the ultimate, comprehensive solution to artificial intelligence; indeed, in several contexts, other approaches result to be more useful. Typical bioinformatics tasks, for instance classification, are currently carried out mostly by machine learning (ML)-based solutions. In this paper, we focus on the relatively new problem of analyzing the evolution of neurological disorders. In this context, ML approaches already demonstrated to be a viable solution for classification tasks; here, we show how ASP can play a relevant role in the brain evolution simulation task. In particular, we propose a general and extensible framework to support physicians and researchers at understanding the complex mechanisms underlying neurological disorders. The framework relies on a combined use of ML and ASP, and is general enough to be applied in several other application scenarios, which are outlined in the paper.