Abstract
The paper describes an expert system for the assessment of the liver function. Since the system must act as an intelligent assistant for a general physician, a major emphasis has been laid upon its interactive capabilities. In particular, the user can ask the system how a given conclusion has been reached (explanation facilities) and can alter the normal operation flow. In the design of the system, the different significance and availability of the clinical data and the laboratory tests have been taken into account: The investigations about a given patient start from the clinical data, and only when there is some evidence of hepatopathy are the results of some laboratory tests requested. The final result of the investigations consists of the assessment of the liver function in terms of four aspects (biosynthesis, cholestasis, cytolysis, reactivity), each of which is assigned a linguistic value describing its impairment degree. The techniques adopted in the system are based on Artifical Intelligence methodologies augmented with linguistic terms handled according to the fuzzy set theory.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Kulikowski C., Artificial intelligence methods and systems for medical consultation.IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Machine Intell., PAMI-2: 464–474, 1980.
Gomez, F., and Chandrasekaran B., Knowledge organization and distribution for medical diagnosis.IEEE Trans. Sys., Man Cybernet., SMC-11: 34–42, 1981.
Patil, R., Szolovits P., and Schwartz W., Causal understanding of patient illness in medical diagnosis.Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vancouver B. C., 1981, pp. 893–899.
Aikins, J. S., Prototypical knowledge for expert systems.Artific. Intell. 20: 163–210, 1983.
Milanese, M., Molino, G., et al., Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of liver diseases.Proceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care, Washington D.C. 1980, pp. 555–563.
Lesmo, L., Saitta, L., and Torasso, P., Computer aided evaluation of liver functional assessment.Proceedings of the 4th Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care, Washington D.C., 1980, pp. 181–189.
Weiss, S. M., and Kulikowski, C., EXPERT: A system for developing consultation models.Proceedings of the 6th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Tokyo, 1979, pp. 942–947.
Horn, W., Buchstaller, W., and Trappl R., Knowledge structure definition for an expert system in primary medical care.Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vancouver, B.C., 1981, pp. 850–852.
Zadeh, L. A., Fuzzy sets as a basis for a theory of possibility.Fuzzy Sets and Systems 1: 3–28, 1978.
Zadeh, L. A., A theory of approximate reasoning.Machine Intelligence 9 (J. E. Hayes, D. Michie, and L. I. Mikulich, eds.), Ellis Horwood, Chichester, 1979, pp. 149–194.
Prade, H., A synthetic view of approximate reasoning techniques.Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Karlsruhe, 1983, pp. 130–136.
Davis, R., and King, J., An overview of production systems.Machine Intelligence 8 (E. W. Elock and D. Michie, eds.) Ellis Horwood, Chichester, 1977, pp. 300–332.
Davis, R., Buchanan, B., and Shortliffe, E., Production rules as a representation for a knowledge based consultation program.Artific. Intell. 8: 15–45, 1977.
Lesmo, L., Saitta, L., and Torasso, P., An interpreter of fuzzy production rules.Proc. 7th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research, Vienna, 1986.
Nilsson, N.,Principles of Artificial Intelligence. Tioga, Palo Alto, 1980.
Sondheimer, N., and Relles, N., Human factors and user assistance in interactive computer systems: An introduction.IEEE Trans. Syst., Man Cybernet., SMC-12: 102–107, 1982.
Milanese, M., Bona B., Frediani, S., Saitta, L., Cravetto, C., and Molino, G., Optimization of diagnostic procedures in hepatology.Proceedings of the 1st Annual AAMSI Conference, Washington, 1982, pp. 19–22.
Molino, G., Cravetto, C., Torasso, P., Lesmo, L., Bona, B., Belforte, G., and Milanese, M., A sequential approach for the identification of liver diseases based on clinical findings and biomedical investigation.Ital. J. Gastroenterol. 15: 112–118, 1983.
Lesmo, L., Saitta, L., and Torasso, P.: Learning of fuzzy production rules for medical diagnosis.Approximated Reasoning in Decision Analysis (M. M. Gupta and E. Sanchez, eds.), North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1982, pp. 249–260.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lesmo, L., Marzuoli, M., Molino, G. et al. An expert system for the evaluation of liver functional assessment. J Med Syst 8, 87–101 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02221872
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02221872