Expertness from Structured Text? Reconsider: A Diagnostic Prompting Program,

Abstract

Reconsider is an interactive diagnostic prompting which uses simple information retrieval techniques to prompt a physician regarding possible diagnoses, given a list of positive patient findings. Its knowledge base consists of 'structured text' definitions of 3262 diseases and a synonym dictionary. Patient findings, and their synonyms, are matched against inverted files of terms from the disease descriptions, the number and selectivity of the patient findings matching terms in a given disease description determine that disease's 'score', and the matched diseases are sorted on this score to form a preliminary differential diagnosis. Definitions of diseases can be referenced for viewing by name, or by their position in a differential. While its first formal evaluation is not yet complete, the performance of RECONSIDER continues to exceed the expectations of user and designer alike.

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Feb 01, 1983
Accession Number
ADP001178

Entities

People

  • David D. Sherertz
  • Mark S. Tuttle
  • Marsden S. Blois
  • Stuart Nelson

Organizations

  • University of California, San Francisco

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • California
  • Computational Processes
  • Computer Languages
  • Computing-Related Activities
  • Dictionaries
  • Formal Languages
  • Information Retrieval
  • Language
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Natural Languages
  • Physicians
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Words (Language)

Fields of Study

  • Medicine

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Gulf War Illness and Chronic Multisymptom Illness in Veterans.
  • Oncology and Biomarker-Based Cancer Detection.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Information Retrieval