CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1.Background to the Study

The world is fast evolving and in order to cope with the insatiable demand of the human race for the kind of living that can be described as top-notch in which people have all they need at their beck and call, there is the need to develop intelligent decision making applications that will drive systems or devices to carry out tasks that require human intelligence. This concept is known as Artificial Intelligence (AI).In science and technology, the desire for improvement is a constant subject which triggersadvancements.Technology has changed civilization in many different ways. Humans have always been on a path of progression through the help of technology, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen a number of advancements that revolutionized the way people work, live and play.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the area of Computer Science focusing on creating expert machines that can engage on behaviours that humans consider intelligent. Artificial Intelligence is the branch of Computer Science that is concerned with the design and development of the intelligent systems. Recent advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence have led to the emergence of expert systems and computational tools; designed to capture and make available the knowledge of experts in a field.Expert system is an area of Artificial Intelligence that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert (Jackson, 1998). Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning about knowledge, represented primarily as if–then rules rather than through conventional procedural code.The use of computer technology in areas of diagnosis, treatment of illnesses and patient pursuit has highly increased. Though, the fields in which computers are being used have very high complexity and uncertainty; the uses of intelligent systems such as fuzzy logic, artificial neural network and genetic algorithm have been developed (Jimoh et al, 2014).

A Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) is an active knowledge system, where two or more items of patient data are used to generate case-specific recommendation(s) (Chen et al, 2002). This implies that a CDSS is a Decision Support System (DSS) that uses knowledge management to achieve clinical advice for patient care based on some number of items of patient data. This helps to ease the job of healthcare practitioners, especially in areas where the number of patients is overwhelming. Clinical decision support system (CDSS) provides clinicians, staff, patients or other individuals with knowledge and person-specific information, intelligently filtered or presented at appropriate times, to enhance health and health care. A CDSS can also be seen as an application that analyses data to help healthcare providers make clinical decisions (Rouse, 2014).

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