Methods and systems may support conclusions of a clinician by enabling the clinician to arbitrarily define the symptoms according to the patients record. The method may comprise: (a) determining a plurality of symptoms representing a patient and including characteristics of the patient, the symptoms being categorized as present symptoms, absent symptoms or open symptoms (b) establishing a multi-tier relationship between said symptoms and a plurality of diseases based on a knowledge model (c) adjusting weighting factor(s) for at least one multi-tier relationship based on said knowledge model (d) optionally adjusting at least one weighting factor of step (c) by an expert and (e) building a ranking of diseases from said multi-tier relationship based on said weighting factors. The method may provide an efficient ranking of disease information, thereby supporting a clinical diagnosis that may consider multiple symptoms while emphasizing particular symptoms in view of the clinicians expertise.
