An outline of an expert system for diagnosis and treatment of bronchogenic carcinoma

We present in this paper a “rule based knowledge system” for diagnosis and treatment of bronchogenic carcinoma. The rule based knowledge system consists of a “knowledge base”, an “inference engine” and a “graphical user interface”. For the sake of space, these three items will be described but not completely detailed here. The system is wholly described in the monograph [14] (in Spanish). The knowledge base contains the experts’ knowledge in form of logical expressions. The inference engine is a program that both verifies consistency of the knowledge base and extracts automatically consequences from the information used in building the knowledge base. The latter is implemented in the computer algebra language CoCoA and is based on a theory original of the team to which the authors belong. As the paper is intended for different audiences, this theory will be informally presented. A friendly graphical user interface facilitates the introduction of medical data