Psychological diagnosis system

Abstract

The interview used In the realm of Psychology and Psychiatry to evaluate the possible presence of psychological disorders, together with the combination of symptoms and disorders provide an excellent opportunity for the development of an expert system which can be used as a diagnostic tool by the professionals or their assistants. Expert systems have been used in a variety of disciplines, even as diagnostic tools, particularly in the medical field and are claimed to be one of the most interesting products that the artificial intelligence sphere has introduced. The scope of this project was to develop such a system - a diagnostic tool. The system helps determine if the client has any psychological problems and if the presenting symptoms are those of any particular disorder. The system will hopefully help to eliminate the human errors of the psychologist or the psychiatrist and reduce the time they would need to ask these questions rind would thus free up precious time for them to sec other clients. Apart from this, the system is able to generate reports from the client's previous sessions. In addition, the system's knowledgebase is scalable, in that it allows for the addition of new disorders and the inference mechanism adapts appropriately to include these new disorders in its inferencing. An unpretentious success of project completion can be claimed. The key aims and objectives have been reached. The diagnostic feature of the expert system was shown to be successful. Besides, the system has some innovative features that help to avoid the pitfalls outlined in other systems. For instance, the system "realises" when it does not have enough information and stops asking questions. It also "knows" when it cannot solve a problem because it is beyond its body of knowledge. The scalability and thus the learning of new facts, is also an improvement over some systems which do not have this capability.