PubMed Health⌕ Search

SEARCH · PubMed Health

Results for “Expert Systems”

Explore indexed PubMed citations for clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health research. Read source abstracts and follow each citation to its original PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 325 records · Page 18Linked to original sources
PubMed1991

The potential use of expert systems to enable physicians to order more cost-effective diagnostic imaging examinations.

Educating physicians to order diagnostic imaging examinations more cost-effectively is a difficult and time consuming task, which may be assisted significantly by the use of an expert system. This report is based on a study undertaken at the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to determine the feasibility of implementing an expert system to aid physicians in selecting appropriate imaging studies. The report reviews the potential benefits, requirements, and limitations of expert systems under development, and highlights the major issues to be considered in choosing such a system for implementation. An extensive literature search was done and is included to aid the reader interested in pursuing this opportunity for improving the cost-effective utilization of expensive diagnostic imaging resources.

Computer-Assisted Instruction↗
PubMed1986

Computed tomography of the lumbar spine. Experience with an Expert System in computer aided diagnosis.

The authors report their experience in the formulation of an Expert System for computer aided diagnosis in the examination of the lumbar spine with computed tomography. A large number of steps are identified in the process of diagnostic evaluation of CT examinations; about 80 decisional rules are considered and arranged in five 'areas'. The Expert System under study is a first proposal, intended for use by radiologists with some basic training.

Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted↗
PubMed2001

Medical applications of enhanced rule-based expert systems.

The paper describes several types of efficiency enhancements of 'classical' rule-based diagnostic expert systems. The blackboard control structure enables to explore more knowledge bases of the same syntax in parallel, the taxonomy structures make fast zooming of attention possible and provide additional inference mechanism based on inheritance principles. The applicability of the enhancing techniques is documented by four case studies exploring the extended FEL-EXPERT shell in different tasks of medical decision-making. The authors consider the enhancing techniques as useful steps on the way from 'classical' diagnostic expert systems towards more complex multi-agent decision tools.

Classification↗
PubMed1990

[Expert systems in forensic medicine. Pilot project in the differential diagnosis of death caused by hanging].

The special field of legal medicine represents a very heterogeneous science, which makes it impossible, that a forensic pathologist could be an "expert" in all areas. The most recent achievements of computer-technology have opened up the possibility of being able to use a PC to produce an "expert system", for with large computer programs are needed. Therefore we wanted to test in a pilot project, if it was possible to establish an expert system, which was suitable for supporting forensic pathological diagnosis. We confined ourselves to the differential diagnosis of "death by hanging" where a clear line between vital and postmortal events, respectively suicide, homicide and accident was drawn. The discrepancy between the relatively scanty amount of statistically reliable data on the one hand and the complexity of the manifestation of death by hanging on the other hand proved to be the main problem. Although we are not yet able to make an expert system available which meets all our requirements, we are convinced, that in the future computer-aided diagnosis may be of great use for work in legal medicine.

Accidents↗
PubMed1993

Expert systems as an aid for the pathologist's role of clinical consultant: CANCER-STAGE.

The traditional role of the pathologist as a clinical consultant for various clinical specialists has become more difficult with the explosion of information that has taken place in the past decades. Rule-based expert systems offer the ability to store and quickly and efficiently retrieve information that is relevant to specific clinical situations. They are ideally suited for simple repetitive tasks such as the staging of patients with cancer and the retrieval of therapeutic and prognostic information. A microcomputer-based expert system, CANCER-STAGE, is described that allows a pathologist to perform these tasks with minimal computer training. The system was constructed by utilizing an inexpensive expert system development package (EXSYS). The knowledge base from the literature is stored in 370 IF-THEN rules that have notes with therapeutic information and references. The computer user interacting with the system answers questions and is quickly provided with the TNM stage of a particular patient and a short summary with therapeutic options. The conditions can be changed and the results of various WHAT-IF simulations compared for educational purposes.

Consultants↗
PubMed1987

Expert systems for performance review.

A microcomputer-based expert system to interpret hospital and community health service data is described. The system analyses performance indicators, which are key statistics describing levels of achievement in terms both of policy objectives and efficiency. The system is being used to support annual performance reviews of English health authorities. The potential for application of similar systems is discussed.

Community Health Services↗
PubMed1991

The BRIEFER project: using expert systems as theory construction tools.

This article describes the development of BRIEFER I and BRIEFER II, expert systems that advise the therapist on selecting, designing, and developing an intervention at the end of the first therapy session. The process of developing expert systems has aided us in describing what brief therapists do, in modeling the intervention design process, and in training brief therapists.

Clinical Protocols↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Hybrid expert-system approach to nurse scheduling.

The objective of this research was to develop a hybrid expert system entitled NURSE-HELP to achieve flexible and effective scheduling for nurses. NURSE-HELP was developed with the emphasis on following the ergonomics guidelines, which will improve the performance of nurses. Moreover, the combination of linear zero-one goal programming and an expert system program reduces the program run time while maintaining the quality of the schedule. The system was evaluated by comparing 18 sets of 4-week schedules generated by the head nurses manually and by NURSE-HELP. Concerning the amount of time required to generate the schedules, NURSE-HELP averaged less than 20 minutes, whereas head nurses spent from 2 to 4 hours. The quality of the schedules was measured using the following four criteria: 1) minimum staff level not satisfied, 2) day off request not granted, 3) backward rotation, and 4) maximum consecutive work periods on the night shift. NURSE-HELP was superior in all these aspects.

Ergonomics↗
PubMed1990

Educational applications of a knowledge-based expert system for medical decision making in hepatology.

An expert system for medical decision making in hepatology has been developed with the aim of assisting medical education. The knowledge representation is based on different slots respectively concerned with structural and protypical description, and system control. Reasoning is performed at two levels considering in sequence syndromes and diseases. Explanations are available at any time during the reasoning process. Educational facilities are provided by using the help sections of the system, which include definitions and descriptions of finding in both health and disease, as well as summaries defining essential clinical and pathophysiological features of all diagnostic hypotheses. The system provides the following educational functions: support to medical decision making, differential diagnosis, knowledge-base consultation, system description and clinical simulation. A good correspondence was found between the conclusions and suggestions provided by the system and those of the attending physicians. The program, which was written in PROLOG and developed under MS-DOS Operating System, runs on IBM-compatible personal computers equipped with hard-disk and mouse.

Computer Systems↗
PubMed1990

Treatment of chronic heart failure: an expert system advisor for general practitioners.

Most decision-support systems in medicine have been developed in hospital environments, but only few are designed for being used by general practitioners. The present work aims to design an expert system for practitioners in chronic heart failure (CHF) treatment. It provides assistance in defining the therapy relying on CHF aetiology, gravity, physiopathological conditions, and discriminates if other coexistent diseases and/or drugs taken by the patient could interact with CHF management. It warns the physician about the possible interactions of the considered CHF therapy. In case of contraindications, the system suggests another alternative therapy. It also advices about the control tests to follow-up the prescribed therapy, and about the indicated hygienic-dietetic suggestions. To assess its internal consistency, we examined the behaviour of the system with 20 CHF patients, by comparing the suggested therapy with the prescriptions of cardiologists. In 9 cases the suggested therapeutic schemes contained all the "n" drugs administered by the cardiologists. In 5 cases the concordance was on at least two thirds of the prescribed medications, in 5 between one half and two thirds, while in 1 case there was no concordance at all. In none of the 10 cases with partial concordance, were there major discrepancies (i.e. potentially deleterious for the patient) between the expert system's suggestions and the cardiologists' prescriptions. In conclusion, the advices of the expert system were similar to those of the cardiologists, suggesting the feasibility of such a computer support to CHF management.

Anti-Arrhythmia Agents↗
PubMed1992

The Workplace Exposure Assessment Expert System (WORKSPERT).

The fundamental principles of industrial hygiene are based upon the recognition, evaluation, and control of workplace hazards. Occupational safety and health professionals (e.g., industrial hygienists) perform this task by assessing numerous complex factors. In many situations industrial hygienists are not available; therefore, an expert system has been developed to assist the performance of workplace exposure assessments (WEAs). The Workplace Exposure Assessment Expert System (WORKSPERT) evaluates various hazardous substances, workplace conditions, and worker exposures for designated homogeneous exposure groups (HEGs). The three major components of WORKSPERT (i.e., substance, workplace, and exposure factors) are described by 27 multiple attribute variables. An air monitoring program (AMP) may be recommended for each HEG based upon the WEA. The AMP provides recommendations for an appropriate sampling strategy, sampling duration, multiple substance exposures, and number of samples to be obtained in the future. The use of WORKSPERT or other expert systems should never supersede the judgment of occupational safety and health professionals. However, WORKSPERT can be a valuable tool when used by knowledgeable, qualified technical professionals (e.g., safety and health specialists, chemists, engineers, and toxicologists) who understand the specific substance, workplace, and exposure factors for designated HEGs. WORKSPERT allows these people to benefit from the expertise of an industrial hygienist by performing systematic evaluations and obtaining recommendations for corrective actions or an AMP. The use of WORKSPERT to perform WEAs promotes the protection of workers from hazardous substances and assists compliance with occupational safety and health regulations. It also facilitates the communication of substance hazards, workplace controls, and worker exposures in a succinct manner.

Air Pollutants, Occupational↗
PubMed1992

Object-oriented fuzzy expert system for on-line diagnosing and control of bioprocesses.

An object-oriented fuzzy expert system to support on-line control of an automated fermentation plant is described. The major elements of the system consist of a fuzzy inference engine, a database, a knowledge base, and an expression evaluater. The expression evaluater calculates specific rates for growth, and substrate and product formation at different physiological states during the cultivation from the measured data. The specific rates are then compared with the standard target rates stored in the database. If differences outside the set tolerances were observed, the inference engine analyses the reasons for the faults on the basis of the knowledge represented in the form of a knowledge network and fuzzy membership functions of the process variables. The fuzzy expert system was developed on the basis of a shell constructed by using the object oriented Smalltalk/V Mac programming environment, with Lac-tobacillus casei lactic acid fermentation as the example of process application.

Biotechnology↗
PubMedDate not supplied

A hybrid expert system for the diagnosis of epileptic crisis.

This work presents a hybrid expert system (HES) intended to minimise some complex problems pervasive to knowledge engineering such as: the knowledge elicitation process, known as the bottleneck of expert systems; the choice of a model for knowledge representation to codify human reasoning; the number of neurons in the hidden layer and the topology used in the connectionist approach; the difficulty to extract an explanation from the network. Two algorithms applied to developing of HES are also suggested. One of them is used to train the fuzzy neural network and the other to obtain explanations on how the fuzzy neural network attained a conclusion. A case study is presented (e.g. epileptic crisis) with the inclusion of problem definition and simulations. The results are also discussed.

Acute Disease↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Disturbances of impulse formation: an expert system for ECG interpretation.

This paper describes an expert system (ES) that aids in interpretation of some disturbances of impulse formation from electrocardiographic records. The system consists of a user interface, a knowledge base, an inference engine and an explanation facility. It is implemented using Turbo PROLOG and uses the built-in interpreter for goal proving or disproving. The user interface gets information about the case by interrogation through multiple choice or Yes/No questions. The response is processed and stored in a dynamic database. After the interview the processed data are stored in a permanent file for subsequent calls. The knowledge base contains domain rules of the If-Then variety. The inference engine supports the logic-based method of knowledge organization, which is controlled by backward-chaining. The explanation facility is able to give reasons for any fact in the dynamic database. The main diagnosis, the diagnostic criteria and the algorithm used are explained and illustrated with examples. Sample outputs of the system are also given.

Algorithms↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The use of machine learning program LERS-LB 2.5 in knowledge acquisition for expert system development in nursing.

LERS-LB (Learning from Examples using Rough Sets Lower Boundaries) is a computer program based on rough set theory for knowledge acquisition, which extracts patterns from real-world data in generating production rules for expert system development. From LERS-LB evaluation of an SPSS-X data file containing data for recovery room patients, it was concluded that both statistical data files and existing databases can be converted to decision-table format needed by LERS-LB, but it is less desirable to work with statistical files than a well-developed database. It was also concluded that choosing a well-developed database and checking it thoroughly for accuracy and completeness should be done before running LERS-LB, or other learning programs, to avoid problems with data errors. Using rough set theory and a technique called 'dropping conditions' LERS-LB offers, at least in theory, a possible method for identifying which data items are critical to nursing practice. Further research and continued LERS-LB program enhancements still may help with identifying critical data items versus redundant data for nursing practice. LERS-LB, and other learning programs, offer techniques which will help reduce the knowledge acquisition bottleneck in nursing expert system development. It is doubtful, however, that learning programs will eliminate the need for involving domain experts in evaluating rules and expert systems for clinical decision support.

Artificial Intelligence↗
PubMed1987

An example of expert systems applied to clinical trials: analysis of serial graded exercise ECG test data.

Clinical trials collect large amounts of data over time. The use of statistical methods to compare and interpret these serial data often fall short of complete evaluation because the analysis requires clinical judgment. As an alternative, some trials use individual experts or panels of experts to evaluate data, but this method usually requires the participation of clinicians who must spend large amounts of time performing tedious, repetitive tasks. The authors examined the use of expert systems to analyze serial clinical trial data where the analyses required use of clinical judgment. A prototype expert system was built to assess the data obtained from a pair of serial graded exercise ECG tests and reach a decision that would duplicate the decision reached by a cardiologist. The experiment was successful. Expert systems should be further developed and tested in other areas, such as serial coronary arteriography data.

Clinical Trials as Topic↗
PubMed1997

[Expert systems for medicine--functions and developments].

Medical knowledge doubles every five years. Electronic media are necessary to manage these volumes. "Multimedia" and "information highway" are buzz-words and also concern medicine. Medical informatics tries to build a bridge between medical research which generates knowledge and daily practice in hospitals, ambulatory care and public services. Knowledge is used in different representations for multiple purposes and functions. Expert systems are mostly designed to fulfil certain functions and to support routine clinical practice. This paper tries to point out some important functions and to explain the capabilities by means of two example systems which can be used in several medical units. The main problem in using expert systems is, besides the quality of knowledge, the availability of patient data. For this reason the existence of an electronic patient record is another area which will be described in this paper. Expert systems are specialised medical information systems and have to fulfil the same success criteria as all the other systems, e.g. the integration into the daily routine as a trusted tool.

Adult↗