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DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A MEDICAL EXPERT SYSTEM (A CASE STUDY OF DELACK HOSPITAL)

Dept: COMPUTER SCIENCE File: Word(doc) Chapters: 1-5 Views:

Abstract

Diseases must be treated healthy and on time. If they are not treated on time, they can escort to many health problems with these problems might become the reason of death. These problems are becoming inferior due to the scarcity of specialists, health facilities and practitioners. In an attempt to address such problems, studies ended attempts toward design and develop expert systems which can present advice for physicians and patients to make easy the diagnosis along with recommend treatment of patients. This review paper represents a comprehensive study of medical expert systems used for diagnosis of various diseases. It provides a concise overview of medical diagnostic expert systems along with presents an analysis of already existing studies

1.1            BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

An expert system is a software system that attempts to reproduce the performance of one or more human experts, most commonly in a specific problem domain, and is a traditional application and/or subfield of artificial intelligence. A wide variety of methods can be used to simulate the performance of the expert however common to most or all are

1. The creation of a so-called “knowledgebase which uses some knowledge representation formalism to capture the subject matter experts (SME) knowledge and
2. A process of gathering that knowledge from the SME and codifying it according to the formalism, which is called knowledge engineering.

Expert systems may or may not have learning components but a third common element is that once the system is developed it is proven by being placed in the same real world problem solving situation as the human SME, typically as an aid to human workers or a supplement to some information system.

As a premiere application of computing and artificial intelligence, the topic of expert systems has many points of contact with general systems theory, operations research, business process reengineering and various topics in applied mathematics and management science.

Two illustrations of actual expert systems can give an idea of how they work. In one real world case at a chemical refinery a senior employee was about to retire and the company was concerned that the loss of his expertise in managing a fractionating tower would severely influence operations of the plant. A knowledge engineer was assigned to produce an expert system reproducing his expertise saving the company the loss of the valued knowledge asset. Similarly, a system called Mycin was developed from the expertise of best diagnosticians of bacterial infections whose performance was found to be as good as or better than the average clinician was. An early commercial success and illustration of another typical application (a task generally considered overly complex for a human) was an expert system fielded by DEC in the 1980s to quality check the configurations of their computers prior to delivery. The eighties were the time of greatest popularity of expert systems and interest lagged after the onset of the AI Winter

In like manner, developing one of such system to represent the repository of the knowledge of a medical doctor is as essential as any other expert system.

1.2     STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Health care facility should be accessible by all at all times.  However, some of the people that should access these facilities are far removed from these facilities.  More so, in the few available facilities, qualified medical personnel are always key issues that need urgent redress.

In view of the foregoing, it would be of great necessity to provide a computerized system that will provide a complementary medical service, such as medical disease information in places where accessibility is a problem as well as health care facilities where qualified experts are lacking, hence this topic, Medical Expert System.

1.3     AIM AND OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

The aim of this research work is to develop an expert system for Delack hospitals. The objectives include the design of a system

1. That has readily available medical information on certain diseases.
2. That illustrates the use of search engine

• Where enquiry can be made and instant response will be gotten via email

1. That helps patient examine himself based on simple clinical signs.

Lastly, it also targets towards contributing to academic research work.

 

1.4     METHODOLOGY

The system adopts PHP as the design software and requires MySQL as the database.

 

1.5            SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

If this prototype is fully developed will be very useful in many areas such as:

1. It will help to retain the skill of an expert medical doctor in case of any eventuality;
2. It can support academic development;

• It can be useful in many hospitals, both private and government, cases where the expert is not on seat;

1. It can also be used in the laboratory for quick research work.

 

1.6            SCOPE OF THE PROJECT

The scope of the research work gives access to users a readily available knowledge based where information on cause, symptoms, complications and treatments of a particular ailment can be accessed. The system is divided into 2 major modules, which include the admin page and the user page.

The users reads information about ailments on the ailment page and can make use of the search module to navigate directly to a certain ailment (as long as the information is available). The users can also make enquiry and get feedback via email from the admin.

The admin manages the flow of information on the system by adding, removing and updating ailments. Furthermore, the admin also manages the enquiry page.

The scope of this work will include the following

1. A dynamic database system that can act as a knowledge based system
2. A complete model of an expert system to portray sample troubleshooter
3. To implement a dynamic search system

 

 

1.7     LIMITATION OF STUDY

The system is not an expert system in a broad sense; it is just a part of an expert system and the users will be limited accessing the ailments and enquiry page while the admin will be limited to managing records of ailments and enquiries.

 

1.8     DEFINITION OF TERMS/VARIABLES

Diagnose:   The identifying of an illness or disorder in a patient through physical examination, medical tests, or other procedures

Medical:     Relating to medicine, physical examination to determine health: a physical examination by a doctor to check

Expert: Somebody with a great deal of knowledge, skill, training, or experience in a particular field or activity e.g. A medical expert

Knowledge-based: Information system that store wealth of ones knowledge

Symptoms: Signs of an ill health