CADUCEUS (expert system)

CADUCEUS was a medical expert system finished in the mid-1980s (first begun in the 1970s- it took a long time to build the knowledge base) by Harry Pople (of the University of Pittsburgh), building on Pople's years of interviews with Dr. Jack Meyers, one of the top internal medicine diagnosticians and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Their motivation was an intent to improve on MYCIN - which focused on blood-borne infectious bacteria - to focus on more comprehensive issues than a narrow field like blood poisoning (though it would do it in a similar manner); instead embracing all internal medicine. CADUCEUS eventually could diagnose ~1000 diseases.

While CADUCEUS worked using an inference engine similar to MYCIN's, it made a number of changes (like incorporating abductive reasoning) to deal with the additional complexity of internal disease- there can be a number of simultaneous diseases, and data is generally flawed and scarce.

References

* [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=6597 "Expert systems: perils and promise"] , D. G. Bobrow, S. Mittal, M. J. Stefik. "Communications of the ACM", pp 880 - 894, issue 9, volume 29, (September 1986)
*"The AI Business: The commercial uses of artificial intelligence", ed. Patrick Winston and Karen A. Prendergast. ISBN 0-262-23117-4