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The KUSIVAR project


The KUSIVAR project was a part of KUSIN-MED, a Nordic research program dealing with the application of medical knowledge-based systems. KUSIVAR was a collaborative research project involving the Medical Intensive Care Unit, Södersjukhuset, Siemens Elema AB, Unisys AB and the Division of Medical Informatics, Linköping University. This collaboration resulted in a knowledge-based decision-support system called VentEx. The VentEx system has been built to support ventilator therapy management using knowledge-based system technology. Development started with an early prototype system called KUSIVAR that dealt with knowledge representation and knowledge acquisition research using the Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE) from Intellicorp. A domain specific tool called KAVE (see figure below) was later developed to facilitate the knowledge acquisition process. Then a PC-based on-line system (VentEx) was built as an integrated knowledge-based system in the clinical environment. Because it was not possible to use KEE at a reasonable cost (due to the expensive hardware and software), Nexpert Object from Neuron Data was used in the real environment. The evaluation of the system indicate the usefulness of KAVE, and there was a strong consensus between the doctors and VentEx with respect to a "gold" standard.

The project was carried out with collaboration among domain experts, clinical engineers and knowledge engineers. A group of domain experts (5-6) were involved in tuning the knowledge base. The main knowledge acquisition process took about 3 years including the development of KAVE. The figure below shows the whole process of the KUSIVAR project.

[The process of the KUSIVAR project]