The Expert System Model

Medical informatics is the branch of science concerned with the use of computers and communication technology to acquire, store, analyze, communicate, and display medical information and knowledge to facilitate understanding and improve the accuracy, timeliness, and reliability of decision making.39 Understanding an observation is defined as the recognition of the relationship between what is observed and some prior observations or communication. A generalization that describes the relationships among such a set of observations is called a model of the set of observations or system. Decision making frequently involves the use of models. The subject matter in this volume is designed to assist the reader in learning to build a model of a system and implement the model using a computer so as to perform some useful intellectual task. Medical diagnosis is used as the principal example.