Diagnosis is made by XDIS

"Medical Gazette" (The organ of Health Ministry of the USSR)
No 107, September 6, 1989, p.3

Lecture notes for practicing physicians, Issue No.23 (251)

by V. Rodionov, MD, PhD, Head of Clinical Section of the Department of Hyperbaric Medicine of the National Center for Surgery of the USSR


Researchers of the Research and Development Association NPO ASU "Moscow" in collaboration with the leading Moscow clinical specialists have developed a computer based system XDIS for the assistance to the physicians in making diagnosis. The system contains the information on symptomatic manifestations of more than 300 internal diseases and pathologic syndromes most frequently met in general practice.

For each set of symptoms entered for a case the system allows getting the full list of possible diagnoses (from the set stored in the database) ranked from the most probable to the lest probable. This may shorten the time to make the correct diagnosis and may reduce the number of diagnostic errors. In the same time a physicians may obtain the information on the symptoms of each of the diseases and pathologic syndromes contained therein. The time to work out a diagnosis usually is less than 10 minutes.

XDIS helps make a preliminary diagnosis in the first visit of a patient to the physician and in the same time decide on the necessity of referring the patient to a specialist and to select medical tests to make a more exact diagnosis. This helps more rationally manage the flow of patients in the managed care setup.

In the number of the symptoms in the database (more than 500) were included only those easily discovered in the first medical interviews without percussion, auscultation or the results of lab and clinical and other tests. In particular, this allows to implement the system in remote practices that cannot benefit from advanced medical tests or when the specialist of the certain specialty is unavailable (e.g. an epidemiologist in AIDS).

Information for those who are interested in XDIS: the system is implemented on IBM compatible personal computers with MS DOS operating system such as ES-1840, Iskra-1030, Neuron, CM-1810 and others.

The medical knowledge component of the system was engineered by a team of experts headed by the Associate Member of the National Academy of Sciences S.N. Efuni with participation of specialists from National Center of Surgery and National Center of Cardiology.

XDIS is commercially available through the communal computing center "Health Care" (Moscow, Phone 201-0714)


The system sold for 5 annual salaries of a physician per license ...


For other products of MEDINCO see PHARM-2: Expert System for Decision Support in Drug Therapy"
Vlad Olchanski, PhD: email volchans@vcu.edu