Skip to main content
Log in

An expert system for the evaluation of liver functional assessment

  • Articles
  • Published:
Journal of Medical Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Kulikowski C., Artificial intelligence methods and systems for medical consultation.IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Machine Intell., PAMI-2: 464–474, 1980.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Gomez, F., and Chandrasekaran B., Knowledge organization and distribution for medical diagnosis.IEEE Trans. Sys., Man Cybernet., SMC-11: 34–42, 1981.

    Google Scholar 

  3. 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.

  4. Aikins, J. S., Prototypical knowledge for expert systems.Artific. Intell. 20: 163–210, 1983.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. Zadeh, L. A., Fuzzy sets as a basis for a theory of possibility.Fuzzy Sets and Systems 1: 3–28, 1978.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. 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.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Prade, H., A synthetic view of approximate reasoning techniques.Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Karlsruhe, 1983, pp. 130–136.

  12. 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.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Davis, R., Buchanan, B., and Shortliffe, E., Production rules as a representation for a knowledge based consultation program.Artific. Intell. 8: 15–45, 1977.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Lesmo, L., Saitta, L., and Torasso, P., An interpreter of fuzzy production rules.Proc. 7th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research, Vienna, 1986.

  15. Nilsson, N.,Principles of Artificial Intelligence. Tioga, Palo Alto, 1980.

    Google Scholar 

  16. 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.

    Google Scholar 

  17. 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.

  18. 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.

    Google Scholar 

  19. 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.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints 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

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02221872

Keywords

Navigation