CADUCEUS (expert system)

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CADUCEUS was a medical expert system, an early type of recommender system - by Harry Pople of the University of Pittsburgh. Finished in the mid-1980s, it was built on the INTERNIST-1 algorithm (1972-1973). [1] In its time, CADUCEUS was described as the "most knowledge-intensive expert system in existence". [2] CADUCEUS eventually could diagnose up to 1000 different diseases.

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The knowledge base was built on Pople's years of interviews with Dr. Jack Meyers, one of the top internal medicine diagnosticians and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. [3] Their motivation was to improve on MYCIN, a recommender which focused on blood-borne infectious bacteria and instead embrace all internal medicine. [3]

While CADUCEUS worked using an inference engine similar to MYCIN's, it made a number of changes. As there can be a number of simultaneous diseases, and data is generally flawed and scarce it incorporated abductive reasoning to deal with the additional complexity of internal disease. A disease can manifest a set of signs and symptoms, and a manifestation can, in turn, evoke a disease. Relationships between symptoms and diagnosis were ranked from 0 to 5. 5 indicated that the symptom is always associated with the disease, while 0 indicated that the association was ambiguous. An initial list of symptoms entered by the practitioner would be evaluated by the program to suggest possible diseases related to these combinations. [3] These predictions were improved from INTERNIST-I by the use of constrictor relationships. [1]

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References

  1. 1 2 Wolfram, D. A. (1 April 1995). "An appraisal of INTERNIST-I". Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. 7 (2): 93–116. doi:10.1016/0933-3657(94)00028-Q.
  2. The Fifth Generation. Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Ma 01867, 275 Pp. Feb 1, 1984
  3. 1 2 3 Batson, Eric (February 1984). "Computer as consultant: Application of artificial intelligence in diagnosis". Postgraduate Medicine. 75 (2): 211–214. doi:10.1080/00325481.1984.11697944.

Further reading