Computer Assisted Diagnosis of Chest Pain. Preliminary Manual

摘要

Chest pain is the presenting symptom for several very serious illnesses, some having potentially fatal outcomes. In addition, chest pain has been reported to be one of the most frequent causes of medical evacuation from submarines. The Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory is developing programs, in the style of the computer-assisted diagnosis program for acute abdominal pain, to assist the submarine corpsman in the diagnosis, triage, and management of chest pain illness. The purpose of the present report is to summarize and document the progress to date on the computer-based diagnostic program for chest pain. The disorders considered are: myocardial infarction, angina, pneumonia, pneumothorax, and nonspecific (non-life-threatening) chest pain. A very preliminary version of a program to predict outcome of M.I. (myocardial infraction) is also presented. As it stands, the chest pain diagnostic/prognostic program described here is not ready for clinical use. Revision of both parts of the program to incorporate ECG measures and recent findings regarding the indicant-disease relationships is in progress.