An expert system for the evaluation of liver functional assessment

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.

[1]  L. Zadeh.  Fuzzy sets as a basis for a theory of possibility , 1999 .

[2]  Casimir A. Kulikowski,et al.  EXPERT: A System for Developing Consultation Models , 1979, IJCAI.

[3]  Lotfi A. Zadeh,et al.  A Theory of Approximate Reasoning , 1979 .

[4]  Mario Milanese,et al.  Optimization of diagnostic procedures in hepatology , 1982 .

[5]  Peter Szolovits,et al.  Causal Understanding of Patient Illness in Medical Diagnosis , 1981, IJCAI.

[6]  Nils J. Nilsson,et al.  Principles of Artificial Intelligence , 1980, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[7]  C. A. Kulikowski,et al.  Artificial intelligence methods and systems for medical consultation , 1980, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[8]  Leonardo Lesmo,et al.  Computer-Aided Evaluation of Liver Functional Assessment , 1980 .

[9]  Edward H. Shortliffe,et al.  Production Rules as a Representation for a Knowledge-Based Consultation Program , 1977, Artif. Intell..

[10]  Keith Price,et al.  Review of "Principles of Artificial Intelligence by Nils J. Nilsson", Tioga Publishing Company, Palo Alto, CA, ISBN 0-935382-01-1. , 1980, SGAR.

[11]  Henri Prade,et al.  A Synthetic View of Approximate Reasoning Techniques , 1983, IJCAI.

[12]  Pietro Torasso,et al.  LEARNING OF FUZZY PRODUCTION RULES FOR MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS , 1993 .

[13]  Fernando Gomez,et al.  Knowledge Organization and Distribution for Medical Diagnosis , 1981, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

[14]  Norman K. Sondheimer,et al.  Human Factors and User Assistance in Interactive Computing Systems: An Introduction , 1982, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

[15]  Randall Davis,et al.  An overview of production systems , 1975 .

[16]  Robert Trappl,et al.  Knowledge Structure Definition for an Expert System in Primary Medical Care , 1981, IJCAI.

[17]  Janice S. Aikins,et al.  Prototypical Knowledge for Expert Systems , 1983, Artif. Intell..

[18]  Mario Milanese,et al.  Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of liver diseases. , 1980 .