International Journal of Engineering and Technical Research (IJETR)

ISSN: 2321-0869, Volume-2, Issue-5, May 2014

Object representation of Patients in Diagnosis Expert

Systems
DigvijayYadav, Amit Singh Gaur, JyotiBudakoti
for example, and in terms of programming these features can
Abstract Expert Systems are generally represented as be conceptually thought of some property of any object at any
simple If-Then or If-Then-Else rules applied on a large particular instance of time. This way an object is a
knowledge-base. In contrast, this article tries to make an
self-contained entity which has all the data and functions that
attempt to simplify the way of structuring the Expert Systems
that are designed for the diagnosis purposes. We take a closer can be applied to the data and also manipulate them.
look at how the Object Oriented Design can be useful for the Similarly, for an expert system designed for diagnosis
expert systems that are specifically designed for the diagnosis purpose the patients can be thought of a class and all the
purposes. Expert systems have definitely been very hard to features like physical appearance or any disease can be
design and to use too, especially if the user of the system does represented as its attribute of an object of this class on a
not belong to the Computer Science background. So, this
article will also try to find few ways of how the expert systems
particular time.
can be made easy to use or at least reduce the efforts the user
has to make while using them. II. CURRENT REPRESENTATION
In the current scenario generally no notion exists for
Index Terms Object oriented design, Objects, Inheritance, representing a patient as an object in expert systems. It is just
Expert System, Abstraction, Disease, Symptoms, Features and
a set of rules and the knowledge base that form the system.
Attributes.
The user simply provides answers to a long series of
questions and at the end the results are shown to the user.
I. INTRODUCTION
This way the user has no clue how the system is interpreting
Over the past two decades, the object oriented design and the answers and the how the results or conclusions are
programming has seen tremendous use and exposure in the achieved. So including the patient as a part of the expert
programming and software design and architecture too. system i.e., representing the patient as an internal object
There can be several reasons for this kind of vast use, but the makes the system more logical when thought from a users
most common and important reason is that now a day most of perception.In the latter case, the patient is simply an object
the software being designed or produced are some being (internally) and has few attributes which are mapped to the
related to real life instances. They intend to represent symptoms of the real patient.
instances (or at least some portion) of the real world. Below
we are highlighting some of the facilities and features that III. PROPOSED ARCHITECTURE
are provided by the Object Oriented Design.
A. Patient as an Object
A. Objects and Classes: Class simply represents any category An object represents an instance of real world set of objects or
of real world things and the Object is just an instance of a real class, similarlya patient is an instance of a larger class of
world class. living beings suffering from some kind of illness and this
B. Inheritance: This represents the ability of a class to inherit instance has several properties and attributes like,
some or the features from another class just as seen in appearance, voice, age, gender and diseases(as he is a
humans, where children inherit some of the features from patient). Also since a patient was born, he can also inherit
their parents. some features from his parents like color, height etc.
C. Abstraction: Object Oriented Design makes it easy to
generalize things by considering only the relevant
information and discarding others, for example for the
treatment of toothache, problems related to eye can be
ignored as it is irrelevant in the treatment of toothache.
D. Features andAttributes: All the objects have some
features; humans have legs, some disease or some expertise,

Manuscript received May 20, 2014.

DigvijayYadav, completed B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering

from G. B. Pant Engineering College Pauri (Garhwal) India
JyotiBudakoti,completed B.Tech in cComputer Science and Engineering
from G. B. Pant Engineering College Pauri (Garhwal) India.
Amit Singh Gaur, completed B.Tech in Electronics and Communication
Engineering from G. B. Pant Engineering College Pauri (Garhwal) India.

306 www.erpublication.org
 Object representation of Patients in Diagnosis Expert Systems

Figure 1:Class representation of patients and humans with B. Abstraction: Now to explain abstractions, consider the ball
inheritance object and we have a task to find the volume of it. In this
case only the mass and density of the ball are the
This way in an expert system a patient can be seen as an attributes that decide the volume of the ball, hence other
object with some properties and attributes some of which are attributes like color or price can be simply ignored,
inherited from the parents. providing us the facility to concentrate only on relevant
things and ignoring unimportant things. Exactly in the
B. Symptoms as Attributes same way, to find out the reason for a simple headache for
An object can have several properties, for example a football a patient, we can simply ignore the leg-pain and
has several features like, its weight, radius, and color etc., at concentrate on the other relevant issues.
a particular time. These attributes can get modified over the
time. In the same way if a human is sick at any point of time
in his life the sickness can be thought of the phase of time
when the human has one more attribute which are the
symptoms of the disease. These symptoms define the state of
the disease and can help in deciding the cause and the cure of
it. Also due to the disease some of other attributes can get
affected. After the treatment the disease attribute of the
patient can be removed or suppressed so it does not affect the
human any more.

C. How Inheritance can help

Since every patient class can be derived from even more
general (or higher level of) one or more classes like Men,
Women, Humans and so on, there are several attributes and
features that a patient class inherits from these classes. In
general, these higher level classes are known as super class or
parent class. Other than these, a patient inherits several
features from its ancestors which again can help in finding
the cause of sickness or disease, if it is some kind of inherited
disease.

D. Use of Abstraction Figure 2: An example comparing the attributes with disease

When a patient comes to a physician and tells the symptoms symptoms and demonstrating Abstraction.
of the disease to him, the physician thinks about the
symptoms and other related issues, for example, for a simple
toothache problem the physician will concentrate mainly on IV. HOW THIS IDEA CAN HELP
the food habits and habits related to cleaning the teeth of the Since a patient belongs to real world and the Object-oriented
patient and ignores other unwanted details like, checking design helps solving problem by mapping real world objects
patients eye or ears. So essentially the physician or classes to virtual programming objects and classes, it
concentrates only on relevant information and ignores other logically can help in representing patient in virtual objects
unwanted detail. This is exactly similar to the abstraction and the solving the problem in hand. This mapping can help
Object Oriented Design provides to the programmers. both the designer and the user of the system as follows:
A system designer experienced in Object Oriented Design
Figure 2 is a graphical example showing/comparing disease can simply avoid the issues of traditional functional
symptom as attributes and how abstraction can be realized in programming approach, for example designer has to
this scenario with explanation of both below: deal with one object i.e., the patient and the attributes of
it(which are contained in the object itself), instead of
A. Symptoms:In the figure below, two objects are shown; Ball collecting data from different places and managing
object and a Patient. As we can see, the features of the different data-structures to keep them safe.
ball like mass, density, color etc. are the properties of the Since dealing with real world problem is fairly easy as
ball at a particular time and can get changed or modified compared to solving completely virtual problems, it is
with time. In the same way, if a patient is thought of considered better to map real word object to virtual
representing an object then the symptoms like toothache objects
or eye problem can be considered its internal attributes, Objects can have different states at different point of time, so it
which can also get changed over time. can be definitely helpful to save the state of current object in
the system as a file or simply be transmitted over a computer

307 www.erpublication.org
 International Journal of Engineering and Technical Research (IJETR)
ISSN: 2321-0869, Volume-2, Issue-5, May 2014
network with the help of serialization. One of the benefits of
saving the state of a patient object is that it can be referenced
in future treatments. Also transmitting the saved object to
other system can enable different users to share, help, and
analyze the disease.

V. CONCLUSION
As we have seen, real world problems are fairly easy to solve
as compared to completely virtual problems, this can make
system design much simplified in contrast to the traditional
functional designs. Also saving and sharing of objects can
help physicians to keep track of medical history of the patient
and reach more solid causes and treatments.

REFERENCES
[1] Elaine Rich and Kevin Knight Artificial intelligence 3ED(SIE)
[2] Dennis deChampeaux, Doug Lea, Penelope Faure Object Oriented
System Development
[3] Hayes-Roth, Frederick, Donald Waterman, Douglas
Lenat(1983). Building Expert Systems. Addison-Wesley
[4] Man, Marriage and Machine Adventures in Artificial Advice, part
1http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/179375/Man-Marriage-and-Ma
chine-Adventures-in-Artificial
[5] J.P. Hamilton Object-Oriented Programming with Visual Basic .NET
O'Reilly Media

DigvijayYadav, completed B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering

from G. B. Pant Engineering College Pauri (Garhwal) India

JyotiBudakoti,completed B.Tech in cComputer Science and Engineering

from G. B. Pant Engineering College Pauri (Garhwal) India.

Amit Singh Gaur, completed B.Tech in Electronics and Communication

Engineering from G. B. Pant Engineering College Pauri (Garhwal) India.

308 www.erpublication.org