Graphical Access to Medical Expert Systems: III. Design of a Knowledge Acquisition Environment*)

Abstract

SummaryKnowledge acquisition for expert systems typically is a tedious, iterative process involving long hours of consultation between the domain experts and the computer scientists who serve as knowledge engineers. For well-understood domains, however, it may be possible to facilitate the knowledge acquisition process by allowing domain experts to develop and edit a knowledge base directly. Administration of protocol-directed cancer chemotherapy is such a well-understood application area, and a knowledge acquisition system, called OPAL, has been developed for eliciting chemotherapy-protocol knowledge directly from expert oncologists. OPAL’s knowledge acquisition approach is based on the interactive graphics environment available on current generation workstations. The use of graphics improves the interface by reducing typing, avoiding natural language interpretations, and allowing flexibility in entry sequence. The knowledge in OPAL is displayed using an arrangement of hierarchically related, graphical forms. The position of a particular form in the hierarchy defines the context of the knowledge contained in the form. Intelligent editing programs such as OPAL can streamline the knowledge engineering process for highly structured domains requiring repetitive knowledge entry.

Setting up a Decision Support System with Decision Tables

“…The use of graphs to present the decision run (e. g., in the form of a tree) might be an improvement. The use of graphic systems might also be of advantage for acquiring the bases of the decisions since this may implify the input and can possibly be carried out directly by the expert as it is, for example, being practised by the knowledge acquisition environment OPAL [22].…”

THEMPO: A knowledge-based system for therapy planning in pediatric oncology

“…Oncocin [14] is an expert system supporting therapy planning and monitoring in adult oncology, and provides a graphical acquisition tool (Opal [22]) for protocol authoring similar to the tools described in section 2. However, Opal and TheMPO for example di er in the acquisition of rule knowledge.…”

Graphical Access to Medical Expert Systems: IV. Experiments to Determine the Role of Spoken Input

“…In the second session, he just named the page all 20 times he wanted one opened or closed. The expert used the more complex UT described in (4). That UT, with just one word added to it, described everything he said in his second session.…”

“…This has led many developers of decision-support tools to consider the extensive use of graphical techniques, often based upon displays that are adapted from paper forms already in use in the clinical setting. We have followed this approach in our research into the interface design for medical therapy planning systems, described in three earlier papers in this journal [2][3][4]. In those three papers, we used the mouse pointing device as the primary input technique.…”