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Methods Inf Med 1990; 29(01): 30-40
DOI: 10.1055/s-0038-1634764
Knowledge-based systems
Schattauer GmbH

Proposed Methodology for Knowledge Acquisition: A Study on Congenital Heart Disease Diagnosis

F. B. Leãot
1   Institute de Cardiologia do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil
,
F. A. Rocha
2   Centro de Informática em Saúde da Escola Paulista de Medicina, São Paulo, Brazil
› Author AffiliationsThe authors express their gratitude to Prof. M. L. Leāo for the revision of the English text, as well as to Ms. Helena Rossi for the proper organization of the bibliography.
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Publication History

Publication Date:
06 February 2018 (online)

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Abstract

“Knowledge and human power are synonymous, since the ignorance of the cause frustrates the effect:…“

Francis Bacon1

This paper proposes a methodology for knowledge acquisition (KA) from multiple experts, in an attempt to elicit the heuristic rules followed by the physician in diagnosing twelve frequently occurring congenital heart diseases (CHD). Twenty-two pediatric cardiologists and twenty-three general cardiologists were interviewed with this technique; 274 interviews were conducted, 169 with the 22 experts, 105 with the 23 non-experts. A graph formalism was employed to represent their reasoning model, leading to the construction of a “mean reasoning model” for each diagnosis, separately for experts and non-experts. The results indicate that experts, compared to non-experts, tend to build knowledge representation models (KRM) that are smaller and less complex. Qualitative differences in information utilization between the two groups were also observed. Entropy analysis suggests a greater objectivity and cohesion of the experts’ model.

Key-Words

Knowledge Acquisition - Expert Systems - Heuristic Learning - Reasoning Models
 

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