Computerized medical diagnostic and treatment advice system including list based processing
First Claim
1. A computerized diagnostic method, comprising:
- providing to a computer a list of diseases, each disease associated with a list of symptoms, and each symptom associated with a list of questions;
repetitively asking questions to elicit responses, the responses establishing symptoms, each established symptom contributing a weight to an accumulated total weight for a disease; and
determining whether the accumulated total weight for a disease reaches or passes a threshold so as to declare a diagnosis.
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Abstract
A system and method for providing computerized, knowledge-based medical diagnostic advice. The medical advice is provided to the general public over a network, such as a telephone network with the use of a telephone or the Internet with the use of an Internet access device. Alternatively, the medical advice can be provided to a patient in a stand-alone mode by use of a computer. The invention utilizes a list-based processing method of generating and executing diagnostic scripts. For the purpose of diagnosing a health problem of a patient, medical knowledge is organized into a list of the diseases to be considered. Each disease on the disease list includes a list of symptoms that is checked in a patient. Each symptom on the symptom list is then further described as a response to a list of one or more questions asked of the patient about the symptom. This triply-nested list structure is converted by suitable data structure transformations into a script that is stored. When a patient requires diagnosis, the script is played back as a sequence of questions. The responses of the patient are analyzed and converted into symptoms. The symptoms are accumulated into diseases. Finally the diseases are selected and reported as a diagnosis.
457 Citations
14 Claims
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1. A computerized diagnostic method, comprising:
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providing to a computer a list of diseases, each disease associated with a list of symptoms, and each symptom associated with a list of questions; repetitively asking questions to elicit responses, the responses establishing symptoms, each established symptom contributing a weight to an accumulated total weight for a disease; and determining whether the accumulated total weight for a disease reaches or passes a threshold so as to declare a diagnosis. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14)
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Specification