1. A method of retrieving similar patient cases from a medical database, the method comprising: matching a current patient case against a plurality of clinical profiles resulting in a set of matching clinical profiles; for each clinical profile from the set of matching clinical profiles, determining a degree of membership of the current patient case based upon a degree of match between the current patient case and the clinical profile; and based on the clinical profiles in the set of matching clinical profiles, retrieving similar patient cases from the medical database that are identified as having a substantially corresponding degree of membership in at least one of the clinical profiles as the current patient case.