Mycin (expert system)

Mycin (proper spelling MYCIN ) is since 1972 at the Stanford University in the programming language Lisp developed expert system , which for diagnosis and therapy of infectious diseases by antibiotics was used. At the time of its development, the excessive use of antibiotics began to be viewed critically and methods were therefore sought to optimize their use depending on the respective clinical picture . For this, numerous parameters had to be determined and related to one another, including the type of pathogen , the previous course of the disease , certain laboratory data, etc. The complexity of this problem became so great that the development of an expert system was pushed forward. This is how MYCIN was finally created, which is considered one of the very first expert systems.

Even if it is considered to be one of the most important milestones in the field of expert systems for computer science , it did not achieve the importance in medical applications that one had hoped for. MYCIN achieved very high hit rates in its diagnoses. However, at the time of its development, the general acceptance of computer systems was still relatively low, so that there was no willingness to rely on the diagnosis of a system that was difficult to understand.

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• Edward H. Shortliffe: Computer-Based Medical Consultations: MYCIN . Elsevier, New York 1976.
• Jürgen Ortmann : Introduction to PC basics (see 401) Addison-Wesley 2003, ISBN 3-8273-2102-6 .
• Cord Spreckelsen, Klaus Spitzer: Knowledge bases and expert systems in medicine . 1st edition. Vieweg + Teubner, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-8351-0251-4 .