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Dissertation Information for Gregory Cooper

NAME:
- Gregory Cooper
- (Alias) Gregory Floyd Cooper

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Medical Informatics

SCHOOL:
- Stanford University (USA) (1985)

ADVISORS:
- None

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Inspected

Title: NESTOR: A COMPUTER-BASED MEDICAL DIAGNOSTIC AID THAT INTEGRATES CAUSAL AND PROBABILISTIC KNOWLEDGE

Abstract: "In order to address some existing problems in computer-aided medical decision making, a computer program called NESTOR has been developed to aid physicians in determining the most likely diagnostic hypothesis to account for a set of patient findings. The domain of hypercalcemic disorders is used to test solution methods that should be applicable to other medical areas.

A key design philosophy underlying NESTOR is that the physician should have control of the computer interaction to determine what is done and when. In order to provide such a controllable, interactive aid, specific technical tasks had to be addressed. The unifying philosophy in addressing them is the use of knowledge-based methods within a formal probability theory framework. The tasks are as follows: (1) Scoring Hypotheses: The likelihood of an hypothesis is determined by using formal probabilistic reasoning with heuristic knowledge introduced explictly as assumptions. During the scoring process causal knowledge is used in guiding the application of relatively sparse probabilistic knowledge. The scoring method emphasizes bounding the probability of an hypothesis rather than calculating it exactly. (2) Searching Hypotheses: A branch and bound search technique is used to search among diagnostic hypotheses for the most probable one. This technique is able to locate the most probable hypothesis without exploring the entire hypothesis space, which is particularly useful in diagnosing complex, multidisease cases where the space may be very large. (3) Explanation: NESTOR is able to critique and compare hypotheses which are generated by the system, volunteered by the user, or both. Critiquing a single hypothesis involves explaining the critical qualitative causal and quantitative probabilistic factors that affect its score. In addition, any two hypotheses can be comparatively critiqued.

A user interface module gives the physician control over when and how these tasks are used to aid in diagnosing the cause of a patient's condition.

This dissertation presents the problems that are addressed by each of the three tasks, and the details of the methods used to address them. In addition, the results of an evaluation of the hypothesis scoring and search techniques are presented and discussed."

MPACT Scores for Gregory Cooper

A = 0
C = 1
A+C = 1
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-01-31 06:24:15

Advisors and Advisees Graph

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Students under Gregory Cooper

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- Hanhwe Kim - University of Pittsburgh (1997)