CADUCEUS was a medical

expert system In artificial intelligence (AI), an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as ...

, an early type of

recommender system A recommender system (RecSys), or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing ''system'' with terms such as ''platform'', ''engine'', or ''algorithm'') and sometimes only called "the algorithm" or "algorithm", is a subclass of information fi ...

- by Harry Pople of the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The university is composed of seventeen undergraduate and graduate schools and colle ...

. Finished in the mid-1980s, it was built on the INTERNIST-1 algorithm (1972-1973). In its time, CADUCEUS was described as the "most knowledge-intensive expert system in existence".The Fifth Generation.

Edward A. Feigenbaum Edward Albert Feigenbaum (born January 20, 1936) is a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence, and joint winner of the 1994 ACM Turing Award. He is often called the "father of expert systems". Education and early life ...

and

Pamela McCorduck Pamela Ann McCorduck (October 27, 1940 – October 18, 2021) was a British-born American author of books about the history and philosophical significance of artificial intelligence, the future of engineering, and the role of women and technolog ...

. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Ma 01867, 275 Pp. Feb 1, 1984 CADUCEUS eventually could diagnose up to 1000 different diseases. The

knowledge base In computer science, a knowledge base (KB) is a set of sentences, each sentence given in a knowledge representation language, with interfaces to tell new sentences and to ask questions about what is known, where either of these interfaces migh ...

was built on Pople's years of interviews with Dr. Jack Meyers, one of the top

internal medicine Internal medicine, also known as general medicine in Commonwealth nations, is a medical specialty for medical doctors focused on the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases in adults. Its namesake stems from "treatment of diseases of ...

diagnosticians and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Their motivation was to improve on MYCIN, a recommender which focused on

blood Blood is a body fluid in the circulatory system of humans and other vertebrates that delivers necessary substances such as nutrients and oxygen to the cells, and transports metabolic waste products away from those same cells. Blood is com ...

-borne infectious

bacteria Bacteria (; : bacterium) are ubiquitous, mostly free-living organisms often consisting of one Cell (biology), biological cell. They constitute a large domain (biology), domain of Prokaryote, prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micr ...

and instead embrace all internal medicine. While CADUCEUS worked using an

inference engine In the field of artificial intelligence, an inference engine is a software component of an intelligent system that applies logical rules to the knowledge base to deduce new information. The first inference engines were components of expert systems ...

similar to MYCIN's, it made a number of changes. As there can be a number of simultaneous diseases, and data is generally flawed and scarce it incorporated

abductive reasoning Abductive reasoning (also called abduction,For example: abductive inference, or retroduction) is a form of logical inference that seeks the simplest and most likely conclusion from a set of observations. It was formulated and advanced by Ameri ...

to deal with the additional complexity of internal disease. A disease can manifest a set of signs and symptoms, and a manifestation can, in turn, evoke a disease. Relationships between symptoms and diagnosis were ranked from 0 to 5. 5 indicated that the symptom is always associated with the disease, while 0 indicated that the association was ambiguous. An initial list of symptoms entered by the practitioner would be evaluated by the program to suggest possible diseases related to these combinations. These predictions were improved from INTERNIST-I by the use of constrictor relationships.

See also

References

Further reading