Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

A Knowledge-Based Clinical Toxicology Consultant For Diagnosing Multiple Exposures, Joel D. Schipper, Douglas D. Dankel Ii, A. Antonio Arroyo, Jay L. Schauben

Publications

Objective: This paper presents continued research toward the development of a knowledge-based system for the diagnosis of human toxic exposures. In particular, this research focuses on the challenging task of diagnosing exposures to multiple toxins. Although only 10% of toxic exposures in the United States involve multiple toxins, multiple exposures account for more than half of all toxin-related fatalities. Using simple medical mathematics, we seek to produce a practical decision support system capable of supplying useful information to aid in the diagnosis of complex cases involving multiple unknown substances.

Methods: The system is automatically trained using data mining …

A Knowledge-Based Clinical Toxicology Consultant For Diagnosing Single Exposures, Joel D. Schipper, Douglas D. Dankel Ii, A. Antonio Arroyo, Jay L. Schauben

Publications

Objective: Every year, toxic exposures kill twelve hundred Americans. To aid in the timely diagnosis and treatment of such exposures, this research investigates the feasibility of a knowledge-based system capable of generating differential diagnoses for human exposures involving unknown toxins.

Methods: Data mining techniques automatically extract prior probabilities and likelihood ratios from a database managed by the Florida Poison Information Center. Using observed clinical effects, the trained system produces a ranked list of plausible toxic exposures. The resulting system was evaluated using 30,152 single exposure cases. In addition, the effects of two filters for refining diagnosis based on …

Rural Assistive Technology Hypermedia Decision Support System, Steven A. Freeman, Don D. Jones, William E. Field

Steven A. Freeman

A prototype hypermedia decision support system for the selection and documentation of rural assistive technology (BNG DATA) was developed to aid professionals working with farmers, ranchers, and agricultural workers with physical disabilities. The hypermedia system (constructed using HyperCard, an environment that combines hypertext and database features) consists of a hypermedia database of rural assistive technology examples and an accompanying decision support system that helps users identify solution alternatives to meet the needs of their clientele. End user acceptance of BNG DATA was determined using an evaluation questionnaire. The end users evaluating the prototype considered BNG DATA to be easy to …