Artificial intelligence in medical diagnosis: the INTERNIST/CADUCEUS approach.

The development of computers has provided a potential tool to assist in the management of the information explosion in medicine. The field of medical diagnosis is intellectually challenging and has attracted the attention of computer scientists interested in building expert systems using artificial intelligence techniques. This paper reviews some of the problems of medical diagnosis and discusses examples of programs representing different approaches to solving these problems. The programs developed in our laboratory, INTERNIST-1/CADUCEUS, are discussed in some detail.