MYCIN

MYCIN MYCIN was developed in 1972 at Stanford University by Edward Shortliffe as a consultation system that focused on appropriate management of patients who have infections. The system was never publicly used in clinical practice settings. In studies, MYCIN gave advice that was compared favorably with that offered by experts in infectious diseases. MYCIN is not currently being used.

Background

MYCIN used roughly 600 production rules to determine the infectious disease diagnosis. Production rule is a conditional statement that relates observations to associated inferences that can be drawn. MYCIN would take the physician’s replies to the questions into consideration and provide a list of possible disease diagnosis ranked from high to low based on the probability of each.

Statistics

Research conducted at Stanford Medical School on therapy selection for patients with meningitis found that MYCIN gave an acceptable therapy in about 69% of the cases, which compared favorably with that offered by experts in infectious diseases. MYCIN was a factor in improving research and.

Clinical Applications

Lack of technology during its development in 1972 led to few clinical uses of MYCIN. MYCIN required all relevant data about a patient to be entered by typing the responses into a stand alone system. This took more than 30 minutes for a physician to enter in the data, which was an unrealistic time commitment. In current times, an EHR would extract answers to questions from a patient’s database.