Mycin

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MYCIN was an early expert system developed over five or six years in the early 1970s at Stanford University. It was written in Lisp as the doctoral disseration of Edward Shortliffe under the direction of Bruce Buchanan, Stanley N. Cohen and others. It arose in the laboratory that had created the earlier Dendral expert system, but emphasized the use of judgmental rules that had elements of uncertainty (known as certainty factors) associated with them. This expert system was designed to identify bacteria causing severe infections, such as bacteremia and meningitis, and to recommend antibiotics, with the dosage adjusted for patient's body weight — the name derived from the antibiotics themselves, as many antibiotics have the suffix "-mycin".

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[edit] Method

MYCIN operated using a fairly simple inference engine, and a knowledge base of ~600 rules. It would query the physician running the program via a long series of simple yes/no or textual questions. At the end, it provided a list of possible culprit bacteria ranked from high to low based on the probability of each diagnosis, its confidence in each diagnosis' probability, the reasoning behind each diagnosis (that is, MYCIN would also list the questions and rules which led it to rank a diagnosis a particular way), and its recommended course of drug treatment.

Despite MYCIN's success, it sparked debate about the use of its ad hoc, but principled, uncertainty framework known as "certainty factors". The developers performed studies showing that MYCIN's performance was minimally affected by perturbations in the uncertainty metrics associated with individual rules, suggesting that the power in the system was related more to its knowledge representation and reasoning scheme than to the details of its numerical uncertainty model. Some observers felt that it should have been possible to use classical Bayesian statistics, although MYCIN's developers addressed this issue in detail in their paper introducing certainty factors (see Shortliffe EH and Buchanan BG. A model of inexact reasoning in medicine. Mathematical Biosciences 23:351-379, 1975) and again in their extensive book on MYCIN and related experiments (see Rule Based Expert Systems: The MYCIN Experiments of the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project, BG Buchanan and EH Shortliffe, eds. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1984).

[edit] Results

Research conducted at the Stanford Medical School found MYCIN to propose an acceptable therapy in about 69% of cases, which was better than the performance of infectious disease experts who were judged using the same criteria. This study is often cited as showing the potential for disagreement about thereapeutic decisions, even among experts, when there is no "gold standard" for correct treatment (see Yu VL, et al. Antimicrobial selection by a computer - a blinded evaluation by infectious disease experts. Journal of the American Medical Association 242:1279-1282, 1979).

[edit] Practical use

MYCIN was never actually used in practice. This wasn't because of any weakness in its performance. As mentioned, in tests it outperformed members of the Stanford medical school faculty. Some observers raised ethical and legal issues related to the use of computers in medicine — if a program gives the wrong diagnosis or recommends the wrong therapy, who should be held responsible? However, the greatest problem, and the reason that MYCIN was not used in routine practice, was the state of technologies for system integration, especially at the time it was developed. MYCIN was a stand-alone system that required a user to enter all relevant information about a patient by typing in response to questions that MYCIN would pose. The program ran on a large time-shared system, available over the early Internet (ARPANet), before personal computers were developed. In the modern era, such a system would be integrated with medical record systems, would extract answers to questions from patient databases, and would be much less dependent on physician entry of information. In the 1970s, a session with MYCIN could easily consume 30 minutes or more -- an unrealistic time commitment for a busy clinician.

MYCIN's greatest influence was accordingly its demonstration of the power of its representation and reasoning approach. Rule-based systems in many non-medical domains were developed in the year's the followed MYCIN's introduction of the approach. In the 1980s, expert system "shells" were introduced (including one based on MYCIN, known as E-MYCIN) and supported the development of expert systems in a wide variety of application areas.

A difficulty that rose to prominence during the development of MYCIN and subsequent complex expert systems has been the extraction of the necessary knowledge for the inference engine to use from the humans expert in the relevant fields into the rule base (the so-called knowledge engineering).

[edit] See also

  • CADUCEUS (expert system)
  • PUFF (expert system) -(diagnosis of breathing disorders; uses same inference engine as Mycin but substitutes in new domain knowledge[1])

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Build Your Own Expert System." by Chris Naylor. Book review by Robert McNair. The Statistician, Vol. 34, No. 2. (1985), p. 255.

[edit] External links