A MICROCOMPUTER TEACHING AND DECISION-SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR EMERGENCY-MEDICINE - USE OF HYPERMEDIA AND ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE IN COMBINATION

Hospital emergency units are submitted to a continuous intensive and p olyvalent practice of medicine. In addition to the few experienced phy sicians, the medical staff is often made up of young and unskilled stu dents and residents. The ability to reach at any time a wide and flexi ble knowledge is of the utmost importance to improve the quality of ca re given to patients and to perfect bedside teaching. The purpose of t his work was to present a computerized system, a kind of shell, using, in combination, artificial intelligence and hypertext/hypermedia tool s. A modular architecture is presented integrating two entities: an il lustrated encyclopedic hypertext network and several expert modules ba sed on production rules concerning well-limited fields of medicine (ba sic clinical problem-solving, metabolic and acid-base disorders). An i nterface using the World Wide Web (WWW) will soon be proposed.