A new concept toward computer-aided medical diagnosis - a prototype implementation addressing pulmonary diseases

The original concept that led to the structuring of a computer-based medical decision support system (DSS) that is able to support a physician's diagnosis is introduced in this paper. The concept's implementation modeled a generic DSS, the core of which are an integrated knowledge/information base (KIB) along with the inference properties of a data evaluator. The KIB encapsulates the necessary medical knowledge and experience in the form of rules and constraints, preemptive tasks and actual patients' clinical data. The data evaluator handles approved medical subjective and objective criteria for assessing the KIB's data. The data evaluator incorporates a medical standard data gathering and decision process, structured upon the principles of the clinical differential diagnosis methodology, and has been integrated in the system by means of both algorithmic and artificial intelligence techniques. The novel model and the resulted computer-based package have been extensively tested at the Pulmonary Department of the University Regional Hospital Patras, Greece.