Building a speech interface to a medical diagnostic system

Abstract

A description is given of the design of an interface for QMR-DT, an evolving decision-theoretic version of Quick Medical Reference, which performs diagnostic reasoning about diseases in internal medicine. QMR-DT encompasses the part of QMR's functionality that provides differential diagnoses for a set of patient characteristics, but it uses a different algorithm to compute diagnoses. The work described includes two programs that integrate off-the-shelf speech technology with programs that manipulate medical terminology. The term identifier program uses an isolated-word, speaker-dependent speech product to provide an interface for entering medical findings into QMR-DT. Frame browser is an auxiliary program used by the developers of term identifier to examine frame structures. Frame browser was also used to experiment with a continuous-speech system.