Sleep Expert--an intelligent medical decision support system for sleep disorders

A new type of associative knowledge-based decision support system (Sleep Expert) for the diagnosis and classification of sleep disorders is described. Sleep Expert is based on the International Classification of Sleep Disorders (1990). The programming system used was KnowledgePro (Windows), a high-level language that integrates object-oriented programming, hypertext and expert system technologies. Sleep Expert is an interactive program composed of 288 separate integrated submodules and 264 text files. The program includes eight reasoning questions about symptoms setting the limits for the diagnosis subset. The user obtains a list of possible diagnoses on the screen where he/she can examine their criteria. The program has been written in such a form that the user can freely associate and can move forwards and backwards. Detailed information is included in hypertext.