[An expert system neurology--possibilities and limitations]

We present an expert system Neurology, which was developed completely on basis of the commercial available data base program Filemaker-7.0. At present it covers approximately 400 diagnoses of neurological and psychiatric diseases. After the input of cardinal symptoms, course and localisation of the disease the program calculates a first set of possible differential diagnoses and asks for additional symptoms or the performance of apparative diagnostics to investigate the final diagnose. At first, the performance of the expert system was tested with 15 predetermined neurological case reports. Users with different previous knowledge of Neurology performed the input. In this test the program was able to identify the correct diagnose in nearly all cases and the diagnostic proposals were superior to those of the users with minor neurological training. In a second test with real patient data, the rate of correct diagnoses was approximately 80%. In summary, the used computer algorithms proved as appropriate for the aim of giving Neurological diagnoses. Possible additional applications could be student training or the use as interdisciplinary reference work.