Comparative Study of Computer-Aided Clinical Diagnosis of Birth Defects.

摘要

In recent years many computer systems have been developed to assist in medical decision making. Two of these systems in particular, INTERNIST and the Present Illness Program (PIP), have been proposed as suitable for performing general medical diagnosis. However, there has been no way of comparing the performance of these two programs since the medical data used by the data programs differs extensively. In order to make such a comparison versions of both systems have been implemented, and the medical data used by each has been abstracted from a single data base in the domain of birth defects. Although both systems use a common paradigm of constructing diagnostic hypotheses and then testing those hypotheses by suggesting further tests, variations in their implementation of this paradigm result in significant differences in performance. A detailed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of these two approaches to computer-aided medical diagnosis, in the diagnosis of thirty-five clinical cases drawn from the congenital defects domain, is presented. The results of this analysis are used to generate suggestions for the improvement of such programs. (Author)