Zambia is facing a critical shortage of medical personnel, primarily affecting rural areas, which impacts the quality of healthcare. The development of a medical diagnosis expert system, specifically ZAMDES, aims to address this issue by diagnosing tropical diseases and recommending treatments based on user-inputted symptoms. Successful implementation and testing of such systems could significantly enhance healthcare delivery and save lives in the region.

1. Addressing the shortage of Medical
Doctors in Zambia: Medical Diagnosis
Expert System as a solution
Nixon Mendez
Department of Bioinformatics

2. Objectives :
 Expert systems can help in minimizing the consequences of the shortage of
medical personnel in Zambia.
 Develop medical diagnosis expert systems specific to Africa.
 Designing, developing and testing a medical expert system, capable of
diagnosing tropical diseases.

3. Outline :
The system consists of three parts:
1. A user interface -user to interact with the system
2. A knowledge base - collection of facts and rule
3. An inference engine - exams the knowledge base for information that matches
the user's query. It is created from information provided by a number of
experienced medical doctors.
4. Language used – PROLOG language.

4. Introduction
 Zambia faces a severe shortage of medical personnel, especially medical
doctors due to migration and limited number of medical schools. Rural areas
are mostly affected.
Other causes of the inadequate number of trained health personnel.
1. Early retirement by health.
2. Change in careers.
3. Some tend to join politics.
4. Some specialist health workers get infected with HIV- AIDS.

5. Introduction
 The performance of a health care system is dependent
1. Size
2. Distribution
3. Skill set of its workforce
 It is an Obstacle to the provision of quality health care.

6. Table 1 : Presents data on the distribution of medical
doctors in the various provinces, against the Ministry of
Health recommended staffing levels.

7. Table 2 : Presents the distribution of medical doctors
in various provinces, against the population in each
province.

8. Solution:
 To adopt and use of medical expert systems. In artificial
intelligence, an expert system is a computer system that
emulates the decision making ability of a human expert.

9. Medical Diagnosis Expert Systems
 Three medical diagnosis systems namely Mycin, Davial and Oncocin were
accessed for use in Zambia.
 MYCIN is a medical diagnosis expert system- infectious blood diseases
caused by bacteria in the blood and meningitis.
 DIAVAL is a medical expert system - diagnose heart diseases.
 ONCOCIN is a medical expert system - treatment of cancer patients
receiving chemotherapy.

10. Disadvantages:
1. The user interface only supports English language.
2. It is only able to diagnose only that particular disease.
3. It tends to over diagnose.
4. Bases advice on the data available at that particular time.

11. Zambian Medical Diagnosis Expert System
(ZAMDES)
 It is capable of diagnosing tropical Diseases which lacked in western systems.
Requirements:
 The language to be used is English.
 The system shall contain 50 diseases in its knowledge base.
 The system shall provide a console interface through which a user can interact with
the system.
 The system shall prompt the user to enter feature/features which indicate a condition
of a disease, in particular one apparent to the patient. These feature/features are also
known as symptoms.
 The system shall identify the nature of an illness (disease) based on symptoms.
 The system shall recommend the use of particular medication or treatment based on
the nature of an illness.

12. ARCHITECTURE

13. Process
 Data Input: Data such as the symptom which indicates a
condition/disease will be inputted by the user.
 Processing: Data processing will be carried out after the symptoms of a
disease have all been entered into the system.
 Data Output: Output of the information will be displays the
disease/condition and medication for treatment.

14. Process
 User Interface - communicate with the user.
 Operating system environment - Microsoft windows 7
 Language of development was PROLOG.

15. Testing
 A number of tests were carried out for malaria, dysentery and cholera
 It gave correct diagnosis and treatment recommendations.
INTERFACE

17. Conclusion
1. Medical diagnosis expert systems have a lot of potential and can help
address the shortage of medical doctors, especially in rural areas.
2. Sensitization of users is vital for the success of medical diagnosis
expert systems.
3. Thorough testing of medical diagnosis expert system is very
important.
4. It is important to gather knowledge to give correct treatment.
5. The patients can get a quick diagnosis and in turn save a lot of lives,
whose input is very much needed to uplift the Zambian economy.

18. THANK YOU