Design and implementation of a medical diagnostic system
INTRODUCTION
1.0 BACKGROUND OF STUDY
Medical diagnosis, (often simply termed diagnosis) refers both to the process of attempting to determine or identifying a possible disease or disorder to the opinion reached by this process. A diagnosis in the sense of diagnostic procedure can be regarded as an attempt at classifying an individual’s health condition into separate and distinct categories that allow medical decisions about treatment and prognosis to be made. Subsequently, a diagnostic opinion is often described in terms of a disease or other conditions.
In the medical diagnostic system procedures, elucidation of the etiology of the disease or conditions of interest, that is, what caused the disease or condition and its origin is not entirely necessary. Such elucidation can be useful to optimize treatment, further specify the prognosis or prevent recurrence of the disease or condition in the future.
Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) are interactive computer programs designed to assist healthcare professionals such as physicians, physical therapists, optometrists, healthcare scientists, dentists, pediatrists, nurse practitioners or physical assistants with decision making skills. The clinician interacts with the software utilizing both the clinician’s knowledge and the software to make a better analysis of the patient’s data than neither humans nor software could make on their own.
Typically, the system makes suggestions for the clinician to look through and the he picks useful information and removes erroneous suggestions.
To diagnose a disease, a physician is usually based on the clinical history and physical examination of the patient, visual inspection of
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1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
Disease diagnosis and treatment constitute the major work of physicians. Some of the time, diagnosis is wrongly done leading to error in drug prescription and further complications in the patient’s health. It has also been noticed that much time is spent in physical examination and interview of patients before treatment commences.
