Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Using this inference rule, it is possible to logically infer medical diagnoses
B
of a patient's ailment from symptoms
A
with the aid of the medical knowledge
represented as fuzzy relation
R
.
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3.4.3
Computer-Supported Medical Diagnostics
The rapid accumulation of data from medical research gave rise to the speculation
that computers could be used to help in the field of medical diagnosis. Thus, shortly
after the emergence of computers the first projects started when medical investiga-
tors used automatic data processing techniques to study correlations of signs and
symptoms with diseases and to store medical knowledge in computer systems. One
of the protagonists of computer assistance in medical diagnosis and decision-making
was Lee Browning Lusted (1922-1994), a physician and mathematician who later
was the founding editor of the journal
Medical Decision Making
. Some of his writ-
ings reflect the events of the times: “I felt that medical data could be processed by
computer and that medical information could be made more useful to physicians
by repacking it in a more usable form. I was not sure how this could be done but
the idea of making information more useful by making it more usable stuck with
me” [45].
Lusted and Robert Steven Ledley (1926-2012), a doctor of dentistry and electri-
cal engineer who later became the founding president of the
National Biomedical
Research Foundation
(NBRF), wrote the
Science
article, “Reasoning Foundations of
Medical Diagnoses” that was published in the 1959 [42]. They introduced logical
analysis in the medical diagnosis process and to open medical science for methods
of decision-making and computer sciences. However, this “software thinking” is
only a half of what was developed at the time; it was attended by “hardware ideas”:
Also toward the end of the 1950s, the physician Martin Lipkin (born 1936) and
his mentor James Daniel Hardy (1904-1985) began to wonder how the new com-
puter technology could be used in medical research and within the scope of a doc-
tor's activity. In the department of medicine of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical
Center, Lipkin and Hardy sought ways to master the constantly growing flood of
information. They were well aware of the developments in computer technology,
thanks to the writings of Vannevar Bush but also from other publications reaching
back to the 1940s and even the 1930s and touching upon “mechanical” comput-
ing and sorting machines that used cards and needles or punch cards. The idea
arose of using machines of this type to build collections of data sets that were be-
ing accumulated during medical research, to carry out classifications and to develop
interconnections among them. It was also thought that it might be possible to use
this method to mechanically store data from patients' medical histories and to study
whether this technology might be helpful in medical diagnostics. In 1958, Lipkin
and Hardy reported on their project in the
Journal of the American Medical Associ-
ation
, in which they sought to classify all of the diagnosis data from hematological
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For more details see chapter 7 in [77].
