Abstract
Many physiotherapy treatments begin with a diagnosis process. The patient describes symptoms, upon which the physiotherapist decides which tests to perform until a final diagnosis is reached. The relationships between the anatomical components are too complex to keep in mind and the possible actions are abundant. A trainee physiotherapist with little experience naively applies multiple tests to reach the root cause of the symptoms, which is a highly inefficient process. This work proposes to assist students in this challenge by presenting three main contributions: (1) A compilation of the neuromuscular system as components of a system in a Model-Based Diagnosis problem; (2) The PhysIt is an AI-based tool that enables an interactive visualization and diagnosis to assist trainee physiotherapists; and (3) An empirical evaluation that comprehends performance analysis and a user study. The performance analysis is based on evaluation of simulated cases and common scenarios taken from anatomy exams. The user study evaluates the efficacy of the system to assist students in the beginning of the clinical studies. The results show that our system significantly decreases the number of candidate diagnoses, without discarding the correct diagnosis, and that students in their clinical studies find PhysIt helpful in the diagnosis process.
Highlights
When a patient contacts a physiotherapist (PT) regarding a problem in the peripheral nervous system or muscular system, the usual cues are either in terms of motion or sensory abilities
Our results show that the tool always finds the correct diagnosis and that the troubleshooting process can significantly decrease the number of candidate diagnoses, and facilitates trainee PTs
Due to the completeness property of our troubleshooting process, in out of the cases the system managed to decrease the size of the diagnosis set without removing the correct diagnosis. These results show that even in realistic scenarios conducted by experts PhysIt found sound diagnoses and succeeded to reduce the diagnosis set without missing the real diagnosis
Summary
When a patient contacts a physiotherapist (PT) regarding a problem in the peripheral nervous system or muscular system, the usual cues are either in terms of motion or sensory abilities. A weakened motion is indicated by an observation on the muscles, while a defected sensation is indicated by an observation on the dermatomes These reports are the symptoms of the patient. To discriminate the root cause among the possible diagnoses, a troubleshooting process is executed in which the PT performs a series of tests that are meant to disambiguate between the correct diagnosis and the rest. This approach is usually time consuming and can be ineffective, especially in the case of trainee PTs with little experience
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