Medical Diagnosis Expert System for Malaria and Related Diseases for Developing Countries

Abstract

There is a strong need for cost-effective technologies to manage disease processes and thus reduce morbidity and mortality in the developing countries. Yet bringing intelligent healthcare informatics to bear on the dual problems of reducing healthcare costs and improving quality and outcomes is a challenge even in countries with a reasonably developed technology infrastructure. This paper focused at how appropriate an ap-plication of Medical Diagnosis Expert System (MDES) is to manage diseases in developing countries. MDES is usually designed to enable clinicians to identify diseases and describe methods of treatment to be carried out taking into account the user capability. The MDES described here is implemented using the C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS). The CLIPS is an expert system, which has a shell composed of four modules: the user interface, the explanation system, the inference engine and the knowledge base editor. In the system, a number of patient cases will be selected as prototypes and stored in a separate database. The knowledge is acquired from literature review, human experts and the internet of the specific domain and is used as a base for analysis, diagnosis and recommendations.