HERMES: an expert system for the prognosis of hepatic diseases

The authors present the design and implementation of HERMES (HEpathology Rule-based Medical Expert System), an expert system for the prognosis of chronic liver diseases developed over the last three years at the Gastroenterology Unit of Bellaria Hospital in Bologna. It is a rule based system running on KEE and linked to an Oracle data base system for the management of patients. The system infers from rules the elements relating to diagnosis, prognosis and therapy by combining the scores with weights which can vary dynamically through meta-rules. First the authors introduce the medical problem, the design approach to the development of the expert system and the computer environment. Then the authors present HERMES architecture, the reasoning techniques and the probabilistic reasoning system. Finally the authors indicate a few details of the implementation experience