The role of expert system shell induction in the analysis of phase and amplitude images obtained from nuclear cardiology

Abstract

In an attempt to explain the results of a perception experiment, estimates of statistical parameters were obtained from phase and amplitude images of nuclear medicine multiple-gated cardiac studies. A commercially available induction system was used to create a rule-based decision tree using these estimates as a training set. In the classification of normal and abnormal studies two useful rules were found; one of these involved the standard deviation of the left ventricular phase histogram and the other concerned the correlation of adjacent pixels in the left ventricular region of the amplitude image. A discriminant analysis performed on five amplitude and five phase parameters produced no better discrimination than the use of the phase standard deviation alone. Although it was hoped that induction would find more than two useful rules, the results of the discriminant analysis confirm that induction has performed creditably on a difficult problem.