The ADM system is a wide medical knowledge base. It was created 15 years ago and has two main goals : helping physicians in making diagnosis and enabling rapid access to medical information through telematic networks.

Knowledge and Data-Base

The current knowledge base deals with all medical domains. It contains the descriptions of 15600 diseases, syndroms and clinical presentations. It includes a data dictionary of 110 000 entities and a word dictionary which counts 45 000 words.

The database is implemanted on a Relational database management system. It is composed of several tables in relation with descriptive entities (diseases, signs..) and with words. It is regularly updated by physicians.

There are many possibilities in the use of the system : diagnosis evocation, strategy in asking for complementary tests, interaction between disease and drug , between disease and pregnancy, electronic encyclopedia.

The Telematics consultation system

The system is available on our Web server. Everyone may access to the demonstration version. The use of the entire system is allowed only for physicians after we have given them a password. They can use menus and text as dialogue with the system. Questions types are defined. It is essentially the encyclopedic aspect which has been developped.

Other fonctions, particularly the diagnosis evocation module is being improved. They will be consulted by students and researchers on the university network using the Intranet Web server.

The interaction with the computer is done in semi-natural langage. It uses dictionaries and hierarchies defined in the database.

The word dictionary counts 45 000 words, 27 000 of which are assembled together in word families. Each family has got a reference word, the other words of the family are synonyms or grammatical terms. It is updated from nomenclatures (CIM, Mesh, CDAM) and new terms in the ADM entities dictionary, and from french and medical dictionaries.