A Knowledge Engineering System for MEDAS

This paper introduces a Knowledge Engineering System, the Disorder Toolbox (DT), which assists physicians to build, test, and verify the knowledge base for the Medical Emergency Decision Assistance System (MEDAS). DT is designed using a hypertext/hypermedia system and gives physicians an intelligent and user-friendly tool to streamline the disorder pattern creation process. DT reads the Portable Patient File (PPF) generated by the Intelligent Medical Record Entry (IMR-E) System, and allows the medical expert to enter prior and conditional probabilities, and test the posterior probabilities for disorders during the knowledge creation time. After building the disorder patterns, the physician can load a PPF and produce a differential diagnosis using the multimembership Bayesian inference engine. The process of building the Disorder Toolbox and its use are described