Bone Browser a decision-aid for the radiological diagnosis of bone tumors

Bone Browser, a decision-aid for radiological diagnosis of bone tumors, was developed in cooperation with the Radiology Department of the Rambam Medical Center, Haifa. The system offers case specific advice from an expert system (ES), general information on the lesion area and allows for recording and retrieving cases. The ES utilizes both rule-based and probabilistic inferencing methodologies to arrive at a differential diagnosis (DD). The knowledge base was validated on 105 cases with known outcome. Clinical evaluation consisted of 59 new cases whose final diagnosis was not known to the evaluators. The correct diagnosis was included in the system's DD in 85% of the cases, which is comparable to the diagnostic accuracy of senior radiologists (88%). The system proved to be helpful to the expert, diagnosing cases missed by the radiologists and suggesting additional diagnoses not listed by the radiologists, raising their diagnostic capability to 91%.