PERFUSE: an interactive knowledge-based system for the interpretation and explanation of cardiac imagery

The clinical evaluation of nuclear medicine myocardial perfusion studies is an information-intensive task requiring accuracy, consistency, and speed. Our aim is to facilitate this task by creating a knowledge-based approach assisting clinicians in their image-interpretation work. The approach is based on the design, implementation, and testing of a clinically useful, interactive, knowledge-based system to assist in the interpretation of myocardial perfusion distributions. This system extracts and transforms patient data into symbolic representations, capturing the visual reasoning of experts and thus providing a computerized assessment of the study. This assessment is presented as both a textual report and in graphical form. The review process itself is supported through an interactive (English-language text) report justification and explanation process. This paper focuses on the creation of the graphical user interface, and on the generation of the textual information derived from the numerical system output, both of which have been combined into a comprehensive, dynamic working environment