XBONE: a hybrid expert system for supporting diagnosis of bone diseases.

In this paper, XBONE, a hybrid medical expert system that supports diagnosis of bone diseases is presented. Diagnosis is based on various patient data and is performed in two stages. In the early stage, diagnosis is based on demographic and clinical data of the patient, whereas in the late stage it is mainly based on nuclear medicine image data. Knowledge is represented via an integrated formalism that combines production rules and the Adaline artificial neural unit. Each condition of a rule is assigned a number, called its significance factor, representing its significance in drawing the conclusion of the rule. This results in better representation, reduction of the knowledge base size and gives the system learning capabilities.