Expert systems
 
An expert system can be defined as: a computer program that contains and uses knowledge to analyze data and to suggest problem solutions or user actions. The name comes from the “simulation” of the human expert behavior.

Medicine has been one of the first application fields for expert systems since ‘70s.

A typical feature of expert systems is the separation between the knowledge and the program that contains and manages the knowledge itself.
Shortly, to build and validate a medical expert system, the following are required:
  • The knowledge source – one or more individuals, expert in a specific medical field. The expert role is close to the author of a book, with the difference that knowledge in the expert system becomes "active".
  • The knowledge engineer, who transfers the knowledge from the human expert to the program. This role requires both medical and informatics expertise.
  • The program that supports the knowledge representation and makes it active, called "expert system shell".
  • An extended clinical validation cycle, with significant number of users and cases.
Euristic includes an “expert system shell”, that may be used for expert systems in different medical areas, each one able to operate on every data contained in the hospital information system. Components of Euristic team have been working in knowledge engineering since 1991 for the development of a neurological expert system.
This system is in clinical routine use in a university department of neurology in the United States with over 22,000 cases.