[A system to aid decision-making. Application to automatic interpretation of vectorcardiograms]

This paper presents a complete and autonomous system for the automated diagnosis (heuristic approach). The system was worked out by means of a small computer. A flexible, evolutive, quasi-universal system is achieved through original procedures. A specialised language enables the users to describe diagnoses and their criteria in symbolic form. A suitable compiler translates this symbolic writing into an interpretable object program. This, with the Interpreter program, constitutes the 'Automated Diagnosis Program'. Our data are vectorcardiograms recorded according to the Frank orthogonal system. After an interactive pre-processing process, 180 parameters--mostly spatial--are computed. The data, the computed parameters and additional information are stored in a data bank. Finally, the medical interpretation is automatically selected from 125 possibilities. The user could also utilise a data bank interrogation language.