CADUCEUS was a medical

expert system In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as if� ...

finished in the mid-1980s (first begun in the 1970s- it took a long time to build the

knowledge base A knowledge base (KB) is a technology used to store complex structured and unstructured information used by a computer system. The initial use of the term was in connection with expert systems, which were the first knowledge-based systems. ...

) 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 The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the univers ...

. Their motivation was to improve on MYCIN (which focused on

blood Blood is a body fluid in the circulatory system of humans and other vertebrates that delivers necessary substances such as nutrients and oxygen to the cells, and transports metabolic waste products away from those same cells. Blood in the cir ...

-borne infectious

bacteria Bacteria (; singular: bacterium) are ubiquitous, mostly free-living organisms often consisting of one biological cell. They constitute a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria were am ...

) to focus on more comprehensive issues than a narrow field like

blood poisoning Sepsis, formerly known as septicemia (septicaemia in British English) or blood poisoning, is a life-threatening condition that arises when the body's response to infection causes injury to its own tissues and organs. This initial stage is foll ...

(though it would do it in a similar manner); instead embracing all internal medicine. CADUCEUS eventually could diagnose up to 1000 different diseases. While CADUCEUS worked using an inference engine similar to MYCIN's, it made a number of changes (like incorporating

abductive reasoning Abductive reasoning (also called abduction,For example: abductive inference, or retroduction) is a form of logical inference formulated and advanced by American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce beginning in the last third of the 19th century ...

) to deal with the additional complexity of internal disease- there can be a number of simultaneous diseases, and data is generally flawed and scarce. CADUCEUS has been described as the "most knowledge-intensive expert system in existence".The Fifth Generation. Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Ma 01867, 275 Pp. Feb 1, 1984

See also

References

Further reading