914575
Building a speech interface to a medical diagnostic system
A description is given of the design of an interface for QMR-DT, an evolving decision-theoretic version of Quick Medical Reference, which performs diagnostic reasoning about diseases in internal medicine. QMR-DT encompasses the part of QMR's functionality that provides differential diagnoses for a set of patient characteristics, but it uses a different algorithm to compute diagnoses. The work described includes two programs that integrate off-the-shelf speech technology with programs that manipulate medical terminology. The term identifier program uses an isolated-word, speaker-dependent speech product to provide an interface for entering medical findings into QMR-DT. Frame browser is an auxiliary program used by the developers of term identifier to examine frame structures. Frame browser was also used to experiment with a continuous-speech system.<<ETX>>
5333493
A Heuristic Approach to the Multiple Diagnoses Problem
A new heuristic model for the diagnosis of multiple related disorders in a patient case is presented. The model constructs differential diagnoses of single and related disorders, based on a medical knowledge base containing disease descriptions and linkages among diseases in the knowledge base.
28952345
Consistency enforcement in medical knowledge base construction
Some aspects of knowledge base creation can be partially or completely automated, resulting in higher quality and smaller effort. Computer assistance is particularly valuable in ensuring the internal consistency of a knowledge base. The article describes several techniques for consistency enforcement in QMR-KAT, an interactive knowledge base editor for the INTERNIST-I/QMR medical knowledge base. Two strategies that improve consistency are applicable to a wide range of situations. The first strategy prevents simple (but common) inconsistencies. The second strategy reveals facts that are potentially (but not necessarily) inconsistent with known data, and may require further evaluation. Both strategies use the contents of the existing knowledge base in the evaluation of new facts.
17723951
DIALOG: A Model Of Diagnostic Logic For Internal Medicine
A system for computer assisted medical diagnosis has been developed, which incorporates an innovative model of diagnostic logic. A supporting medical data base has also been assembled, now comprising approximately fifty percent of the major diseases of internal medicine. Using weighted associations between disease entitles and their manifestations, and employing a powerful attention focusing heuristic, the system has demonstrated competence In dealing with difficult clinical problems involving multiple diagnoses.
14511628
Interactive Simultaneous Editing of Multiple Text Regions
Simultaneous editing is a new method for automating repetitive text editing. After describing a set of regions to edit (the records), the user can edit any one record and see equivalent edits applied simultaneously to all other records. The essence of simultaneous editing is generalizing the user’s selection in one record to equivalent selections in the other records. We describe a generalization method that is fast (suitable for interactive use), domain-specific (capable of using high-level knowledge such as Java and HTML syntax), and under user control (generalizations can be corrected or overridden). Simultaneous editing is useful for source code editing, HTML editing, and scripting, as well as many other applications.
473917
Leveraging data and structure in ontology integration
There is a great deal of research on ontology integration which makes use of rich logical constraints to reason about the structural and logical alignment of ontologies. There is also considerable work on matching data instances from heterogeneous schema or ontologies. However, little work exploits the fact that ontologies include both data and structure. We aim to close this gap by presenting a new algorithm (ILIADS) that tightly integrates both data matching and logical reasoning to achieve better matching of ontologies. We evaluate our algorithm on a set of 30 pairs of OWL Lite ontologies with the schema and data matchings found by human reviewers. We compare against two systems - the ontology matching tool FCA-merge [28] and the schema matching tool COMA++ [1]. ILIADS shows an average improvement of 25% in quality over FCA-merge and a 11% improvement in recall over COMA++.
9330046
User interface continuations
Dialog boxes that collect parameters for commands often create ephemeral, unnatural interruptions of a program's normal execution flow, encouraging the user to complete the dialog box as quickly as possible in order for the program to process that command. In this paper we examine the idea of turning the act of collecting parameters from a user into a first class object called a user interface continuation. Programs can create user interface continuations by specifying what information is to be collected from the user and supplying a callback (i.e., a continuation) to be notified with the collected information. A partially completed user interface continuation can be saved as a new command, much as currying and partially evaluating a function with a set of parameters produces a new function. Furthermore, user interface continuations, like other continuation-passing paradigms, can be used to allow program execution to continue uninterrupted while the user determines a command's parameters at his or her leisure.
10913688
A Case Study in Reasoning about Actions and Continuous Change
This paper shows how the Situation Calculus can be extended to deal both with `narratives' and with domains containing real-valued parameters, whose actual values may vary continuously between the occurrences of actions. In particular, a domain is represented where action occurrences may be `triggered' at instants in time when certain parameters reach particular values. Its formalisation requires the integration of several types of default reasoning. Hence Baker's circumscriptive solution to the frame problem is extended to re ect the assumptions that by default a given action does not occur at a given time point, that by default a given set of parameter values does not trigger a given action, and that by default a given action occurrence does not result in a discontinuity for a given parameter. Regarding the minimisation of discontinuities, the example illustrates how circumstances can arise where, at a particular time point, discontinuities in some parameters can be `traded' for discontinuities in others. It is argued that, in general, in such cases extra domain-speci c information will be necessary in order to eliminate anomalous models of
6575212
Lightweight Structured Text Processing
Text is a popular storage and distribution format for information, partly due to generic text-processing tools like Unix grep and sort. Unfortunately, existing generic tools make assumptions about text format (e.g., each line is a record) that limit their applicability. Custom-built tools are one alternative, but they require substantial time investment and programming expertise. We describe a new approach, lightweight structured text processing, which overcomes these difficulties by enabling users to define text structure interactively and manipulate the structure with generic tools. Our prototype system, LAPIS, is a web browser that can highlight, filter, and sort text regions described by the user. LAPIS has several advantages over other systems: (1) the ability to define custom structure with a simple, intuitive pattern language; (2) interactive specification, showing pattern matches in context and letting users choose the most convenient combination of manual selection and pattern matching; and (3) external parsers for standard text formats. The pattern language in LAPIS, text constraints, describes text structure in high-level terms, with region relationships like before, after, in, and contains. We describe an implementation of text constraints using a novel, compact representation of region sets as collections of rectangles, or region intervals. We also illustrate some examples of applying LAPIS to web pages, text files, and source code.