Uses of diagnostic expert systems in clinical care

The development and testing of computerized systems to assist in the diagnostic process is a time honored research activity in medical information science. The focus of the majority of the applications produced is on providing accurate diagnostic suggestions when appropriate clinical information is entered. We believe that diagnostic knowledge has a much wider range of uses than that of simply assigning diagnostic labels. Below we describe three applications which illustrate alternate uses for diagnostic systems. Applications that assist in data collection, assess the quality of medical reports, and extract relevant clinical data from natural language x-ray reports are discussed. We believe that more effort should be directed toward studying the use of diagnostic knowledge bases in processes that help plan diagnostic strategies, in quality assurance applications, and in processes that facilitate all aspects of medical communication.