An expert system for managing medical appropriateness criteria based on computer algebra techniques

This article presents the development of an expert system for managing medical appropriateness criteria together with an outline of its theoretical foundations. Techniques borrowed from computer algebra (Grobner bases) are applied to this field of medicine. The steps of the expert system construction process are as follows. First, the knowledge provided in table format by experts in coronary diseases is translated into a set of production rules of a rule-based expert system (RBES). Kleene's three-valued logic augmented with modal operators is chosen in order to manage uncertainty. Once the rules are written, they are automatically translated into polynomials. A result that relates tautological consequences in logic with an ideal membership problem in a polynomial ring is the key for dealing with inference and verification in the RBES. The implementation of the (algebraic) inference engine is made in the CoCoA language. Indeed, the problems detected using CoCoA in the knowledge summarized in the table led to the redesign of the table. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.