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Description:
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POEMS (Post Operative Expert Medical System) is a decision support system for post-operative care. Post-operative care can present considerable problems to medical staff that are relatively inexperienced. Deciding when to take a specific action based on monitoring signs and other available data, or distinguish between major or minor changes of the monitoring signs and diagnostic expectations, are complex tasks. They are especially difficult, when senior medical support is not readily available.
POEMS has been developed during the last three years to give advisory and decision support to less experienced staff. POEMS interactively receives data obtained from the patients based on the standard strategy used by the medical staff: Past medical history, operative history, history, examinations, and investigative tests. From this data, POEMS presents an ordered list of likely, possible and not-likely candidate diagnoses and can answer questions on how the diagnosis was reached, what treatment would be most suitable, and what further investigative action could be taken to focus on a particular diagnostic candidate. POEMS knowledge base is servicing 200 post-operative complications, with 900 signs and symptoms, and about 100 treatment actions. The patient data is time tagged and maintained in a history file, which can be used to detect trends and support other time dependent diagnoses. POEMS learns diagnostic knowledge from the patient cases presented to it for diagnosis. It employs a learning apprentice system to evaluate and learn from the patient cases, the diagnosis reached at by POEMS, and the confirmation and advice provided by an expert.
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