RHINOS: A consulatation system for diagnosis of headache and facial pain

This paper is intended to describe the expert system RHINOS for diagnosing patients whose chief complaints are headache and facial pain. RHINOS assists physicians in diagnosing the above-mentioned disease. For this purpose the authors surveyed diagnosing processes used by physicians to determine what advice physicians want. As a result, the author reached the conclusion that knowledge for diagnosing the above-mentioned disease should be categorized according to four types of rules: exclusive rules (if the patient has disease D, he must have symptoms S1, S2, …, Sn), inclusive rules (if the patient has symptoms S1, S2, …, Sn, he has disease D with a probaility X (0 < X < 1)), associate rules (if the patient has symptoms S1, S2, …, Sn the probability that he has the disease D increases) and disease image (if the patient has disease D, he may have symptoms S1, S2, …, Sn). Through harmonious use of these four types of rules, RHINOS gives the advise that physicians want. RHINOS is widely available because it is implemented by Prolog-KABA which is operative on personal computers such as NEC PC9801 and IBM-PC.