Helping patients decide: from Hippocrates to videodiscs--an application for patients with low back pain.

This paper outlines a modular, microcomputer and videodisc expert system, for patients with mechanical low back pain. The system incorporate facts, rules, and methods to extract data, opinions, information, and user preferences. It supports individual patient needs with a broad knowledge base, and analytical modelling techniques that connect flexible inference structures and user choices. Videodisc based expert systems help break the bottleneck in relevant medical knowledge representation. The expert system program serves the user in the capacity of teacher, confidant, interpreter, diagnostician, and adviser.