Xref: utzoo sci.med:9866 comp.ai:4025
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!cadre!geb
From: geb@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU (Gordon E. Banks)
Newsgroups: sci.med,comp.ai
Subject: Re: computing support for 3rd world medicine
Message-ID: <2705@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU>
Date: 28 Apr 89 13:06:28 GMT
References: <778@aipna.ed.ac.uk>
Reply-To: geb@cadre.dsl.pittsburgh.edu (Gordon E. Banks)
Organization: Decision Systems Lab., Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA.
Lines: 15

In article <778@aipna.ed.ac.uk> kk@uk.ac.ed.aipna (Kathleen King) writes:
>
>I'm involved with a project attempting to provide computational support
>(probably in the form of a diagnostic decision aid) for rural health 
>workers in developing countries. Does anyone know of any related or
>similar work, not necessarily just for health workers in developing 
>countries but even for primary health care in general?
>

This is an old idea.  Several incantations have been done on it,
the last being an official one by the government of France, I believe,
about 5 years ago.  As far as I know, all of them have failed for
various reasons.  There is an huge corpus of work on medical expert
systems, much of which has come from our university and laboratory.
The main problem is the gigantic size of the knowledge base.