Categorical and Probabilistic Reasoning in Medical Diagnosis

How do practicing physicians make clinical decisions? What techniques can we use in the computer to produce programs that exhibit medical expertise? Our interest in these questions is motivated by our desire: 1. to provide (by computer) expert medical consultation to general practitioners or paramedical personnel in communities where such consultation is normally unavailable; 2. to come to understand the reasoning processes of expert doctors so that we may improve the teaching of their skills to medical students; and 3. to advance the techniques of artificial intelligence, especially as applied to medicine (AIM), to support our other goals. In other publications, we have described research by our group on programs to take the history of the present illness of a patient with renal disease (Pauker and Gorry, 1976; Szolovits and Pauker, 1976) and to advise the physician in the administration of the drug digitalis to patients with heart disease (Gorry et al., 1978; Silverman, 1975; Swartout, 1977).