Fish disease diagnosis program - problems and some solutions

Any software dealing with disease diagnosis has to overcome various problem s. Some are inherent in the diagnostic technique, others arise because of t he specific problem domain. We have evaluated different expert-system techn ologies including neural-nets, case-based expert systems (ES), rule-based E S and fuzzy logic. The problem domain (fish disease) has it's own problems, the major one being that there is no accepted database of cases like there is in other medical fields. This precludes the use of diagnostic technique s needing a large number of test cases. The other problem in this context i s the effort to deal with ALL diseases for multiple species. We explore the different ES techniques, and outline the final product (Fish-Vet) which in cludes a hybrid system that enables us to obtain reasonable diagnoses in a timely manner. This program uses elements of fuzzy, rule-based and statisti cal systems. The mix and match approach proved useful, and further work has to be performed in order to incorporate other artificial intelligence tech niques into the process. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved .