Abstract
The treatment of chronic hepatitis with traditional Chinese medicine shows good therapeutic effectiveness in clinical practice. Since the process for the diagnosis in Chinese medicine is quite different from that of modern Western medicine, many physicians of modern medicine cannot practise it readily and effectively. We describe an expert system designed to support physicians who may not be familiar with the domain of traditional Chinese medicine, to treat chronic hepatitis by using Chinese medicine. This system was developed by logic programming language PROLOG, where the knowledge of Chinese medicine is represented in a semantic network structure and the reasoning strategy is based on the hypothesize-and-test approach. This system can guide the user to collect patient information easily, and based on those items of information this leads to the possible diagnosis and treatment for chronic hepatitis using Chinese medicine. The results of this system are compared with 40 patient case records and analysed by a specialist in Chinese medicine.