Anesoft: an expert system for canine anesthesia

Abstract

AneSoft, an expert system for canine anesthesia, has been programmed directly fromhuman expertise and domain documents. The application is not large but somewhat complex, and a useful high performance system has been implemented with a friendly user interface. Designed both to provide expert recommendations and learner guidance, AneSoft can generate a set of consultations for making anesthetic plans based on the information about the patient. It can also assess anesthetic schemes made by the user, explaining why any part of that scheme might be contraindicated and providing suggestions for improving the scheme. In addition, AneSoft can produce any number of cases as specified by the user with or without system recommended anesthetic plan, in a well designed, consistent format. We take full advantage of LPA Win-Prolog to build efficient declarative knowledge base and to develop procedural control and user interface. The expert system will soon be ready for field-testing and we are optimistic that it will be of considerable practical use.