Heuristic Programming Project February 1984 Report No. HPP 84-20

Reprinted by permission of the author. Published in the Proceedings of a Symposium on Computers in Medicine, Annual Meeting, California Medical Association, Anaheim, CA., February 1984. Alt;iough computing technology is playing an increasingly important role in medicine, systems designed to advise physicians on diagnosis or therapy selection have remained largely experimental to date. Despite diverse research efforts, and a literature on computer-aided diagnosis that has numbered over 1500 references in the last 20 years, clinical consultation programs have failed to achieve wide acceptance. The reasons for attempting to develop such systems are self-evident.