Automated diagnostic system and method including synergies
First Claim
1. A computerized diagnostic method, comprising:
- repetitively asking questions to elicit responses from a patient, the responses establishing symptoms, each established symptom contributing a weight to a disease;
generating one or more synergistic weights based on the established symptoms;
accumulating established symptom weights and synergistic weights for the disease; and
determining whether the cumulative weight for the disease reaches or passes a threshold so as to declare a diagnosis.
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Accused Products
Abstract
Structure-based processing includes a method of diagnosing diseases that works by arranging diseases, symptoms, and questions into a set of related disease, symptom, and question structures, such as objects or lists, in such a way that the structures can be processed to generate a dialogue with a patient. A structure-based processing system organizes medical knowledge into formal structures and then executes those structures on a structure engine to automatically select the next question. Patient responses to the questions lead to more questions and ultimately to a diagnosis. An object-oriented embodiment includes software objects utilized as active, intelligent agents where each object performs its own tasks and calls upon other objects to perform their tasks at the appropriate time to arrive at a diagnosis. Alternative symptoms, synergies, encoding of patient responses, multiple diagnostic modes, disease profiles or timelines, and the reuse of diagnostic objects enhance the processing of the system and method.
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Citations
11 Claims
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1. A computerized diagnostic method, comprising:
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repetitively asking questions to elicit responses from a patient, the responses establishing symptoms, each established symptom contributing a weight to a disease;
generating one or more synergistic weights based on the established symptoms;
accumulating established symptom weights and synergistic weights for the disease; and
determining whether the cumulative weight for the disease reaches or passes a threshold so as to declare a diagnosis. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)
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9. A computerized diagnostic method, comprising:
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repetitively asking questions over time to elicit responses from a patient, the responses establishing time varying symptoms, each established symptom contributing a weight to a disease;
generating one or more synergistic weights based on the symptoms established over time;
accumulating established symptom weights and synergistic weights for the disease; and
determining whether the accumulated weights for the disease reach or pass a threshold so as to declare a diagnosis. - View Dependent Claims (10, 11)
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Specification