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Mycin

Mycin was one of the earliest expert systems developed in the 1970s at Stanford University to diagnose and recommend treatment for blood infections. It used backward chaining reasoning to reach conclusions based on IF-THEN rules with certainty factors. Mycin was never used in actual practice due to ethical and legal concerns about computer-based medical diagnosis and treatment recommendations. Emycin was developed as an expert system shell that provided a framework for building domain-specific expert systems, similar to Mycin but without the medical knowledge.

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Anirudh Gupta
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2K views7 pages

Mycin

Mycin was one of the earliest expert systems developed in the 1970s at Stanford University to diagnose and recommend treatment for blood infections. It used backward chaining reasoning to reach conclusions based on IF-THEN rules with certainty factors. Mycin was never used in actual practice due to ethical and legal concerns about computer-based medical diagnosis and treatment recommendations. Emycin was developed as an expert system shell that provided a framework for building domain-specific expert systems, similar to Mycin but without the medical knowledge.

Uploaded by

Anirudh Gupta
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Mycin (an expert system)

Expert System

Query
Inference Knowledge
User Engine Base
Advice Interface
Patients

Doctors
Mycin (an expert system)
MYCIN was an earliest designed expert systems in Stanford University in
1970s to diagnose and recommend treatment for certain blood infections.

MYCIN was written in LISP Programming Language.

MYCIN is mainly a goal-directed system, using the backward chaining


reasoning approach.
Mycin was developed partly in order to explore how human experts
make(expert doctors) rough (but important) guesses based on partial information.
However, the problem is also a potentially important one in practical terms - there
are lots of junior or non-specialised doctors who sometimes have to make such a
rough diagnosis, and if there is an expert tool available to help them then this
might allow more effective treatment to be given.
Mycin represented its knowledge as a set of IF-THEN rules with certainty factors.
The following is an English version of one of Mycin's rules:

IF the infection is pimary-bacteremia


AND the site of the culture is one of the sterile sites
AND the suspected portal of entry is the gastrointestinal tract
THEN there is suggestive evidence (0.7) that infection is bacteroid.

The 0.7 is roughly the certainty that the conclusion will be true given the evidence.
If the evidence is uncertain the certainties of the bits of evidence will be combined with
the certainty of the rule to give the certainty of the conclusion.
MYCIN was never actually used in practice. This wasn't because of any
weakness in its performance. As mentioned, in tests it outperformed members of
the Stanford medical school faculty. Some observers raised ethical and legal
issues related to the use of computers in medicine — if a program gives the
wrong diagnosis or recommends the wrong therapy, who should be held
responsible?

MYCIN has been popular in expert system’s research, but it also had a number
of problems or shortcomings because of which a number of its derivatives like
NEOMYCIN developed.
EMYCIN (An expert system shell)

EMYCIN provides a domain-independent framework or template to develop


expert system.

EMYCIN stands for “Empty MYCIN” or “Essential MYCIN” because it basically


constitutes a MYCIN system minus its domain-specific medical knowledge.
Some characteristics of EMYCIN are:
• It constitutes an abbreviated rule language, which uses ALGOL-like notation and
which is easier than LISP and is more concise than the English subset used by MYCIN.
• It uses backward chaining which is similar to MYCIN.
• It indexes rules, in-turn organising them into groups, based on the parameters
which are being referenced.
• It has an interface for system designer which provides tools for displaying,
editing and partitioning rules, editing knowledge held in tables, and also running
rule sets on sets of problems. As part of system designer’s interface, EMYCIN also
included a knowledge editor (a program) called TEIRESIAS whose job was
to provide help for the development and maintenance of large knowledge bases.
• It also has a user interface which allows the user to communicate with the system
smoothly.

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