EXPERT SYSTEM FOR THE DIAGNOSIS OF MALARIA AND TYPHOID FEVER IN LEGACY CAMPUS, BIU

ABSTRACT

This study deals with the design and development of an expert system for the diagnosis of malaria and typhoid fever in legacy campus of Benson Idahosa University, Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria, a common health disorder among Africans. The need for emergency medical diagnosis especially in developing countries where the access to well trained and qualified medical personnel is quite difficult due to the very high patient to doctor ratio has given rise to the design of a Web-based medical diagnosis expert system application developed using the Waterfall  Model. This system interacts with users in plain English language based on some predefined rules. These rules, which are a typical collection of if/then rules, are extracted from experts in the medical fields in Nigeria. Using these rules, a knowledge base was developed for the expert system. The medical diagnostic expert system was designed to diagnose based on individual’s symptoms using knowledge base rule and suggests basic precautionary steps subject to the time the patient can access medical personnel. The medical diagnostic expert system was implemented with PHP programming language and MySQL for the database. The system was able to accurately diagnose some common ailments such as malaria and typhoid fever which are peculiar to the students.