New expert system for pulmonary embolism

PubMed, the Internet portal of biomedical and life sciences literature, indexed an interesting article, entitled “A new expert system for clinical use.” (Emerg Med J. 2007 Mar;24(3):157-64). Authors are Luciani D, Cavuto S, Antiga L, et al., from the Unit of Clinical Knowledge Engineering, Laboratory of Clinical Epidemiology, Mario Negri Institute of Pharmacological Research, Clinical Centre for Rare Diseases Aldo e Cele Dacco, Ranica (Bergamo), Italy. The diagnosis of pulmonary embolism demands flexible decision models. As Bayesian networks fully meet this requirement, Bayes Pulmonary embolism Assisted Diagnosis (BayPAD), a probabilistic expert systems focused on pulmonary embolism, was developed. To quantitatively validate and improve BayPAD, the system was applied to 750 patients from a prospective study done in an Italian tertiary hospital where the true pulmonary embolism status was confirmed using pulmonary angiography or ruled out with a lung scan. BayPAD offers clinicians a flexible and accurate strategy to diagnose pulmonary embolism. Bayesian networks are expected to have a prominent role in the clinical management of complex diagnostic problems in the near future. To access the full abstract of the article, click here.