| |
"Autonomy
can understand and analyse huge amounts of information…..
(it can) categorise the ideas that they contain and build
a sophisticated idea of what it is looking at without human
help…..Autonomy has developed a program that reads, analyses
and acts upon text, a breakthrough in artificial intelligence"
Sunday Times 14.11.99
|
| |
| |
| |
Professor Sir Graeme Catto, the GMC President, recently commented:
"The medical profession could benefit enormously from a differential diagnostic tool like Isabel. The need for such a system is, in my opinion, quite obvious"
|
| |
|
The Isabel diagnostic tool has been made possible by highly sophisticated software produced by Autonomy Corporation. Autonomy is unique in its ability to use sophisticated pattern-recognition techniques, allowing it to act like a human brain in understanding and then categorising text.
Unlike other search tools, the Autonomy software understands and searches for information by context rather than by word. Hence a doctor simply needs to type in the patient's symptoms from which the Autonomy software will extract the key ideas before searching Isabel's extensive library of content to find a similar combination of symptoms - and consequently suggest a range of relevant diagnoses. Current search engines can only search by word, resulting in hundreds of articles concerning each individual symptom rather than a precise diagnosis.
In essence, this mimics the doctor's existing and intuitive diagnostic process, the difference being that the system's base of textbook knowledge is far larger than can readily be stored in the human brain. It's performance is also unaffected by tiredness and overwork.
Isabel's software is also critically dependent on the library of information that is available to it and we have specified only the most widely recognised and acknowledged medical texts for inclusion.
At
present, searches currently use the following textbooks:
- Forfar and Arneil's Textbook of Paediatrics - 5th Edition (1998), Churchill Livingstone
- Nelson's Textbook of Pediatrics - 16th Edition (2000), WB Saunders
- Jones and Dargan Churchill's Pocket Book of Toxicology (2001), Churchill Livingstone
- Rennie and Roberton Textbook of Neonataology - 3rd Edition (1999), Churchill Livingstone.
There are around 3,500 different diagnoses in the Isabel database, each of which has associated text from each textbook. In response to the clinical features entered by the user, the Isabel differential diagnosis tool searches for relevant diagnoses from the database and organises them into different systems for ease of viewing. Each diagnosis produced has information about the condition linked to it. Only text from 'Nelson's Textbook of Pediatrics' is currently displayed for reference.
|