An Expert System for Cardiopulmonary Diseases in Primary Health Care

Abstract

This paper shows the steps we have taken in order to define and design a first prototype of an expert system aimed at the general practitioner. The first part is devoted to analyze the systemic approach we gave to the definition problem. Also are given the results we reached from a delphi analysis which we accomplished in order to get the medical aspects and specifications that defined the system.

The second part shows how the above conclusions drove to the definition of the first prototype:

The knowledge acquisition process was accomplished by means of an especially designed tool, the medical knowledge considered was limited to those common aspects of the interaction of the basic entities in which the knowledge is organized. The knowledge is represented as a net where the vertices are diseases and manifestations and the arcs represent different types of relations.

The tool provides the user with functions as the include or delete function of objects or vertices to the net or with the modification function of the values given to the arcs. The reasoning mechanism evaluates each diagnostic hypothesis (disease) by (1), how the disease explains the symptoms found in the patient and (2) by the symptoms that are usually found with the disease but are not prevalent in the patient. The system is in the validation phase.