An Experimental Computer-Based Diagnostic Consultant for General Internal Medicine

One of the best-known AIM systems is the large diagnostic program con­ structed by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh during the 1970s. The work developed out of a collaboration between Harry Pople (a computer scientist with an interest in AI, logic programming, and medical applica­ tions) and Jack Myers, university professor (medicine) and prominent cli­ nician, who was eager to try to encode some of his diagnostic expertise in a high-performance computer program. Rather than selecting a small sub­ topic in medicine for the work, Pople and Myers decided to consider the entire field of internal medicine. This necessarily required approaches that quickly narrowed the search space of possible diseases and also permitted case analyses in which two or more diseases could coexist and interact. The resulting program, now known as INTERNIST-1 (or INTERNIST, for short), is capable of making multiple and complex diagnoses in internal medicine. It differs from other programs for computer-assisted diagnosis in the generality of its approach and in the size and diversity of its knowledge base.