TARCA — An integrated system for diagnosis and treatment of cardiac arrhythmias

Abstract

TARCA is an Integrated Computer System which includes an Expert System for diagnosis, prevention, therapy planning, as well as monitoring, of cardiac arrhythmias. TARCA is under development at Oporto University in cooperation with S. João Hospital.

TARCA aims towards an autonomous medical aid system for the treatment of cardiac patients from the automatic extraction of the electrocardiogram (ECG) signal to the final diagnosis, followed by a possible preventive medical advice and specifying a therapeutic prescription plan and posterior patient monitoring. It is known that any system in this domain has to deal with many different kinds of knowledge and information sources and to use different types of inference processes. Production rules, frames, probabilistic and mathematical models are among different knowledge representation formalisms which have been used to encode the domain knowledge. The functional architecture of TARCA is based on the blackboard control architecture model, perhaps the most suitable framework for building medical knowledge-based systems fulfilling the requirement of integrating different knowledge representation formalisms.

The automatic ECG acquisition and processing module of TARCA, plus the diagnosis module is already being used at S. João Hospital, while the therapy planning module undergoes the testing state of development.