An expert system on the diagnosis of ascites.

We constructed an expert system on the diagnosis of ascites, using a combination of case reports and unpublished patient data. Rule production was by induction from examples, and the program operated on an algorithm which was a modification of Quinlan's ID3. The result was a small, but formally complete expert system. When tested against a new data set of patients, our expert system predicted the clinical diagnosis 82% of the time.