An expert system supporting diagnosis in clinical psychology

摘要

We introduce an expert system prototype that is meant to support psychologists in finding out what disorders their clients might have. The expert system provides a user interface that permits the psychologist to enter a large variety of symptoms. The symptoms are linked to a database where records of these symptoms/symptom combinations as well as their underlying disorders are stored. The system provides fuzzy rather than deterministic feedback, i.e. instead of suggesting only one diagnosis it indicates all possible diagnoses and estimates the risk for each possible diagnosis individually. The system is not meant to replace psychologists, but rather to support them in generating hypotheses at an early stage of diagnosis.