Computerized medical diagnostic and treatment advice system
View Patent ↗A system and method for providing computerized, knowledge-based medical diagnostic and treatment advice. The medical advice is provided to the general public over a telephone network. Two new authoring languages, interactive voice response and speech recognition are used to enable expert and general practitioner knowledge to be encoded for access by the public. “Meta” functions for time-density analysis of a number of factors regarding the number of medical complaints per unit of time are an integral part of the system. A semantic discrepancy evaluator routine along with a mental status examination are used to detect the consciousness level of a user of the system. A re-enter feature monitors the user's changing condition over time. A symptom severity analysis helps to respond to the changing conditions. System sensitivity factors may be changed at a global level or other levels to adjust the system advice as necessary.
1. A computerized system for use in medical diagnosis, the system comprising:
a data structure configured to be accessed by a plurality of attributes representative of a medical condition of a patient and providing one or more selected medical diagnoses for the patient,
wherein a first attribute corresponds to a cause of disease and a second attribute corresponds to an anatomic system of the patient affected by the medical condition,
wherein the provided data is identified as being located within the data structure based on the plurality of attributes, and
wherein the data structure is stored in a memory.
2. The system of claim 1 , wherein each cause of disease is subdivided into subcauses of disease.
3. The system of claim 1 , wherein each anatomic system is subdivided into anatomic subsystems.
4. The system of claim 2 , wherein the subcauses of disease are further divided into sublists of subcauses of disease.
5. The system of claim 3 , wherein the anatomic subsystems are further divided into sublists of anatomic subsystems.
6. The system of claim 1 , wherein a third attribute is time.
7. The system of claim 6 , wherein the time corresponds to a system clock time of a consultation with the patient.
8. The system of claim 1 , wherein the data structure is a two-dimensional array.
9. The system of claim 1 , wherein the data structure is a three-dimensional cube.
10. The system of claim 1 , wherein the anatomic systems include cardiovascular, respiratory, nervous, digestive/gastrointestinal, ear/nose/throat (ENT), ophthalmologic, gynecologic/obstetric, urologic, blood/hematological, skin/dermatological, bones/orthopedic, and endocrine.
11. The system of claim 1 , wherein the causes of disease include allergy, environment, infection, mental, poison, trauma, vascular, genetic, nutritional/metabolic/endocrine, and tumor.
12. The system of claim 11 , wherein infection is subdivided into bacterial infection and viral infection.
13. The system of claim 12 , wherein bacterial infection is further divided into gram positive and gram negative.
14. The system of claim 1 , wherein the memory is a disk drive.
15. The system of claim 1 , wherein the memory is a floppy disk, a CD-ROM, or a PC memory card.
16. A computerized method used in medical diagnosis, the method comprising:
ascertaining a plurality of attributes representative of a medical condition of a patient, wherein a first attribute is associated with a cause of disease and a second attribute is associated with an anatomic system of the patient affected by the medical condition;
accessing a data structure based on the plurality of attributes; and
identifying a plurality of selected medical diagnoses in rank order associated with a diagnosis of the patient based on the accessing.
17. The method of claim 16 , additionally comprising storing the data structure in a memory of a computer.
18. The method of claim 16 , additionally comprising providing the selected medical diagnoses for the patient from the data structure.
19. The method of claim 16 , wherein each cause of disease is subdivided into subcauses of disease.
20. The method of claim 16 , wherein each anatomic system is subdivided into anatomic subsystems.
21. The method of claim 16 , wherein the data structure is a two-dimensional array.
22. The method of claim 16 , wherein the data structure is a three-dimensional cube.
23. The method of claim 16 , additionally comprising storing the data structure in a disk drive.
24. The method of claim 16 , additionally comprising storing the data structure on a floppy disk, a CD-ROM, or a PC memory card.
25. A computer usable medium having computer readable program code embodied therein for performing a computerized process used in medical diagnosis, the computer readable code comprising instructions for:
ascertaining a plurality of attributes representative of a medical condition of a patient, wherein a first attribute is associated with a cause of disease and a second attribute is associated with an anatomic system of the patient affected by the medical condition;
accessing a data structure based on the plurality of attributes; and
identifying a plurality of selected medical diagnoses in rank order associated with a diagnosis of the patient based on the accessing.
26. The computer usable medium of claim 25 , the computer readable code additionally comprising instructions for providing the selected medical diagnoses for the patient from the data structure.
27. The computer usable medium of claim 26 , wherein the cause of disease is subdivided into subcauses of disease.
28. The computer usable medium of claim 26 , wherein the anatomic system is subdivided into anatomic subsystems.