Daniels JE, Chappell MJ, Tjahjadi T, Cayton RM

Proc of IFAC Symposium on Modelling and Control in Biomedical Systems,

Abstract

A diagnostic consultation system for decision support in a hospital sleep disorders clinic has been developed to aid differential diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnoea and related conditions. The system combines evidence from the patient's history, a physical examination, a questionnaire to assess sleep propensity, and laboratory tests. The patient's symptoms (which are linguistic descriptions of signs and test results) are, by their nature, vague or ambiguous. As such, fuzzy sets provide an intuitively appealing framework for representing the medical knowledge. A fuzzy inference mechanism, using the max-min compositional rule, provides the physician with diagnostic hypotheses based upon accumulated evidence.