DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF COMPUTERIZED DIAGNOSIS SYSTEM – A STUDY OF GENERAL HOSPITAL ISHIAGU

CHAPTER ONE

1.1       INTRODUCTION

Since the introduction of electronic devices into the medical world, the functions and operations of the medical world have been easy with most of the electronica device that are in place to assist the medical personnel in there diagnosis and analysis of patients in various medical illness. Now doctors and nurses or any medical personnel can now carry out a test on a patients and get the analysis from the device used in diagnosing the patience which are electronic apparatus or device, giving numerous advantages over the previous daces of manual means of disease and illness.There is a wide array of electronic devices used to test and diagnose patients.Below is an insight explanation of the differences and different types of equipment used by medical experts or medical technicians for diagnosis.

Digital Mammographic X-ray System

Digital Mammographic X-ray System, Brestige is a full field digital mammography system used for screening and diagnosing breast cancer.

Medical Handpiece(For Dental Laboratory)

MICRO-NX produces products that are used in clinic and dental laboratory. Their main product is Handpiece that is main material for making implant

Thermometer

The practical development of a thermometer suitable for measurement of body temperature dates back to 1625. Whilst internal sounds from the body have been observed by physicians since the time of the Romans, the stethoscope dates back to the 19th Century, in a form reasonably similar to the present.

Advantage of electronic diagnosis system

Improved diagnosis and treatment

Significantly fewer errors found within personal health records

Faster care and decision making responses from assigned medical professionals

Improved results management and patient care with a reduction in errors within your medical practice

Reduced operational costs such as transcription services and overtime labor expenses

The development of electronics, and particularly that of computers has made possible many of the technologies which we shall examine.

Firstly, computers are the central elements involved in processing signals in many cases, and particularly those obtained from images. The special nature of the processing required to obtain the image improvements required and the consequential flexibility in their application mean that the complexity of the algorithms for processing would be excessive unless software was used for managing the process. Medical image processing frequently requires that different views may need to be synthesised in the examination of a condition relating to eachparticular patient. The exact form of the views may be difficult to predict, so computers provide the ideal platform for their analysis.

Secondly the increasing use of computers in medical applications has led to an ever increasing capability to retain medical data. This may be used to facilitate health care planning and to provide for a reliable storage of patient related data which may be readily recovered. They also provide the ability to communicate data using standardised mechanisms which we may expect will increasingly allow data to be acquired in one location and viewed at another.

Finally computers have potential for providing us with systems which mimic the diagnostic processes employed by physicians. Pilot systems which can provide some diagnostic assistance have been tried for a number of years in certain areas both within and outside medicine.

1.2       BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

An expert system or electronic diagnose system is a software hardware system that attempts to reproduce the performance of one or more human experts, most commonly in a specific problem domain, and is a traditional application and/or subfield of artificial intelligence. A wide variety of methods can be used to simulate the performance of the expert however common to most or all are

1) The creation of a so-called "knowledgebase" which uses some knowled+`ge representation formalism to capture the subject matter experts (SME) knowledge and

2) A process of gathering that knowledge from the SME and codifying it according to the formalism, which is called knowledge engineering. Expert systems may or may not have learning components but a third common element is that once the system is developed it is proven by being placed in the same real world problem solving situation as the human SME, typically as an aid to human workers or a supplement to some information system.

As a premiere application of computing and artificial intelligence, the topic of expert systems has many points of contact with general systems theory, operations research, business process reengineering and various topics in applied mathematics and management science.

Two illustrations of actual expert systems can give an idea of how they work. In one real world case at a chemical refinery a senior employee was about to retire and the company was concerned that the loss of his expertise in managing a fractionating tower would severely impact operations of the plant. A knowledge engineer was assigned to produce an expert system reproducing his expertise saving the company the loss of the valued knowledge asset. Similarly a system called Mycin was developed from the expertise of best diagnosticians of bacterial infections whose performance was found to be as good as or better than the average clinician. An early commercial success and illustration of another typical application (a task generally considered overly complex for a human) was an expert system fielded by DEC in the 1980s to quality check the configurations of their computers prior to delivery. The eighties were the time of greatest popularity of expert systems and interest lagged after the onset of the AI Winter.

In like manner, developing one of such system to represent the repository of the knowledge of a medical doctor is as essential as any other expert system.  To this end, this project, Expert System on the Diagnosis of non communicable diseases is a necessity.

1.2       STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Health care facility should be accessible by all at all times.  But some of the people that should access these facilities are far removed from these facilities.  More so, in the few available facilities, qualified medical personnel are always key issues that need urgent redress. 

In view of the foregoing, it would be of great necessity to provide a computerized system that will provide a complementary medical service, such as medical disease diagnosis in places where accessibility is a problem as well as health care facilities where qualified experts are lacking, hence this topic, Expert System or electronic diagnosis system on some medical illness and disease.

1.3       OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

The major objective of this work is to develop an expert system on diagnosis of non-communicable diseases. 

It also targets towards contributing to academic research work.

• To develop modern interactive diagnostic software that will aid clinicians in diagnostic procedures.

• To offer prescription of medication.

• To enable flexibility in access to information through the World Wide Web or comprehensive knowledge bases.

• It is also to ascertain whether the diseases could be diagnosed based on signs and symptoms.

• It will also examine a patient based on simple clinical signs, and to improve family and community health

1.4       SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

If this prototype is fully developed will be very useful in many areas such as:

a.         It will help to retain the skill of an expert medical doctor in case of any eventuality;

b.         It can support academic development;

c.         It can be useful in many hospitals, both private and government, cases where the expert is not on seat;

d.         It can also be used in the laboratory for quick research work.

1.5       SCOPE OF THE PROJECT

The scope of this work will include the following

1.         A dynamic database system that can act as a knowledge based system

2.         A complete model of an expert system to portray sample troubleshooter

3.         Explore the power of visual basic in data handling

4.         To implement a dynamic search system

1.6          LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

The major constraint faced during the implementation of this work was finance.  This is among other frustrations such as program failures during modular construction stages.  Time was another important factor that limited the extent to which I want to research.

1.7       DEFINITION OF TERMS/VARIABLES

Diagnose: The identifying of an illness or disorder in a patient through physical examination, medical tests, or other procedures

Medical:  Relating to medicine, physical examination to determine health: a physical examination by a doctor to check

Communicable:  A communicable disease that can be passed from one person

Expert:  somebody with a great deal of knowledge, skill, training, or experience in a particular field or activity - a medical expert

Knowledge-based:  Information system that store wealth of ones knowledge

Symptoms:  Signs of an ill health