[The use of the microcomputer in selecting the basic cause of death]

The article begins with a discussion of some mortality statistics issues, problems encountered in the manual selection of underlying cause of death, and also the increasing need for information on associated causes. These circumstances led the National Center for Health Statistics to develop the computerized ACME System, which has been in use in São Paulo State since 1983. The ACME System's requirement of a mainframe computer, as well as other operational limitations, has prevented its installation throughout the country. In order to standardize and improve the quality of mortality data in Brazil, the Informatics Department of the Ministry of Health's National Health Foundation and the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Center for the Classification of Diseases in Portuguese developed the microcomputer-based Underlying Cause Selection System (SCB) in 1993. This is an expert system that employs artificial intelligence techniques to reproduce the reasoning of a coder in selecting the underlying cause of death, according to the rules and provisions of the Ninth Revision of the International Classification of Diseases. The SCB has a very user-friendly interface, occupies 2.6 megabytes of hard disk space, and can run on any 386 or higher XT or AT computer. In addition to selecting the underlying cause of death, the system stores data on associated conditions.