An expert system for the evaluation of liver functional assessment.

The paper describes an expert system for the assessment of the liver function. Since the system must act as an intelligent assistant for a general physician, a major emphasis has been laid upon its interactive capabilities. In particular, the user can ask the system how a given conclusion has been reached (explanation facilities) and can alter the normal operation flow. In the design of the system, the different significance and availability of the clinical data and the laboratory tests have been taken into account: The investigations about a given patient start from the clinical data, and only when there is some evidence of hepatopathy are the results of some laboratory tests requested. The final result of the investigations consists of the assessment of the liver function in terms of four aspects (biosynthesis, cholestasis, cytolysis, reactivity), each of which is assigned a linguistic value describing its impairment degree. The techniques adopted in the system are based on Artificial Intelligence methodologies augmented with linguistic terms handled according to the fuzzy set theory.