Abstract
Medical diagnosis in general is a hard task, requiring significant skill and expertise. Psychological diagnosis, in particular, is peculiar for several reasons: since the illness is mental rather than physical, no instrumental measurements can be done, more subjectivity is involved in the diagnostic process, and there is more chance of comorbidity. Eating disorders, specifically, are a quite relevant kind of psychological illness. This paper proposes an Expert Systems-based solution to the above issues. The Expert System was built upon a proprietary general inference engine, that provides several features and reasoning strategies, allowing to properly tune their exploitation through appropriate parameter settings. Qualitative analysis of the prototype revealed interesting insights, and suggests further extensions and improvements.
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Notes
- 1.
During forward reasoning, all current (complete or partial) instantiations of a knowledge item are maintained in a tree, where a child node represents an instantiation that extends the instantiation in the parent. This allows to keep the process of adding or extending instantiations within logarithmic complexity.
- 2.
This also allows to save time: by asserting relevant partial conclusions, driven by the meta-rules, the corresponding information is made immediately available to future deductions; by retracting useless knowledge items, less burden is placed on subsequent reasoning.
- 3.
While quite simple, this strategy is more intuitive and less computationally heavy than other approaches, e.g. the several probabilistic extensions of Prolog.
- 4.
This allows to keep in the working memory only the parts of knowledge that are relevant to the current reasoning task, this way reducing the possible deductions and combinations and improving efficiency.
- 5.
This allows to keep constant the time to get all knowledge items associated to a given predicate.
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Acknowledgments
This work was partially funded by the Italian PON 2007–2013 project PON02_00563_3489339 ‘Puglia@Service’.
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Ferilli, S., Ferilli, A.M., Esposito, F., Redavid, D., Angelastro, S. (2017). An Expert System Approach to Eating Disorder Diagnosis. In: Kryszkiewicz, M., Appice, A., Ślęzak, D., Rybinski, H., Skowron, A., Raś, Z. (eds) Foundations of Intelligent Systems. ISMIS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10352. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60438-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60438-1_4
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