Development of an expert system for preoperative assessment of female urinary incontinence

We developed a simple expert system for preoperative assessment of women complaining of involuntary loss of urine and scheduled to undergo surgery for incontinence. The aim of the system was to use the parameters obtained at urodynamic investigation to arrive at the correct diagnosis. We used an IBM-PC with two disk drives and 256k RAM, and the expert system shell EXSYS, a rule based system with the possibility of assigning probabilities to the different solutions. To write the rules forming the knowledge base we used a two-fold approach: we constructed tree diagrams for each diagnosis and calculated the corresponding predictive values (statistical approach), and we added rules based on our experience (heuristic approach). The expert system has been found reliable in a clinical setting and is useful for teaching purposes.