title: A psychiatric diagnostic system integrating probabilistic and categorical reasoning.
abstract: We describe a diagnostic support system for clinical psychiatry and its evaluation results. The system has two inter-related components: a rule-based reasoning part associated with uncertainty, and a deterministic part, that uses heuristics to perform categorical reasoning. The system includes the 30 groups of psychiatric diagnoses which are classified under the categories 290 to 319 of the DSM-III-R and the ICD-9. There are, in fact, 1508 rules relating 208 clinical findings with 257 diagnoses. The reasoning strategy is based on selecting and differentiating diagnostic categories in a hierarchical classification tree. The system is intended to be used for education of medical students, and to help non-specialist clinicians, residents in psychiatry, or experts with few years of experience in decision making. We tested the diagnostic performance of the system using case reports extracted from a specialized journal. In 52.8% of the cases, the correct diagnosis was ranked as the first hypothesis using only the rule-based part. In combination with the deterministic strategy, the correct diagnosis could be made for 73.6% of the analyzed cases.
authors.affiliation: Division of Medical Informatics, Chiba University Hospital, Japan.
authors.forename: M B
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: do Amaral
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Satomura
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Honda
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Sato
mesh_terms: D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003479:Curriculum; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / Q000295:instrumentation*; D005103:Expert Systems; D006801:Humans; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000145:classification / Q000175:diagnosis*; D010348:Patient Care Team; D011336:Probability; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011570:Psychiatry / Q000193:education; D011594:Psychometrics; D012984:Software