The Knowledge Based Systems Centre

An introduction to the basic concepts of expert systems and the characteristics which distinguish expert systems from conventional software. Some of the emerging uses of the technology that may be useful in the nursing professions are also discussed. Six references Medical software tools began to emerge during the 1980's, some became known as 'expert systems'. In contrast to conventional software which process data, expert systems process 'knowledge'. For this reason, expert systems are also called ‘Knowledge Based Systems ' (KBS). The most well known medical example is MYCIN. ' This expert system was developed at Stanford University in 1976 to aid physicians in diagnosing and treating patients with infectious blood diseases caused by bacteria in the blood and meningitis. These diseases can be fatal if not recognised and treated quickly. Many other medical expert systems have followed the success of MYCIN. Other medical examples will be outlined later in the paper. What are expert systems? An expert system is a program, which attempts to mimic human expertise by applying inference methods to a specific body of knowledge called the domain. Knowledge is different from data or information in that data is passive. Knowledge on the other hand is active in that it can be used to infer new information from what is already known about a problem. As will be seen later, this domain knowledge is frequently represented as rules. Artificial Intelligence Expert systems owe their origin to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). One of the pioneers of AI, Dr. Marvin Minsky defined AI as "The field of study which is attempting to build systems which if attempted by people would be considered intelligent". AI is a broad field, with some of the application areas shown in the diagram below