An automated chest pain diagnostic system for distant space travel

We describe an automated system called Heartache that can take as input diagnostic information such as the location of chest pain, duration of pain, origin and radiation of the pain, and other relevant information to differentiate between possible diagnoses such as non-heart related, anxiety, pericarditis, new myocardial infarction, neuromuscular/skeletal pain, unstable angina, pulmonary embolism, pneumonitis, pneumothorax, stable angina, esophagitis, and tamponade. We also describe how the belief function calculus (a generalization of traditional probabilistic methods) is used to infer the likely pathology from diagnostic inputs that are imprecise, incomplete, and inaccurate to varying degrees. We present the results from using the system on two-hundred diverse medical cases. The system correctly diagnosed all two-hundred cases and was able to explain how the diagnoses was derived, and the factors contributing to the system's conclusions. A successful Heartache system will reduce the need for human medical expertise during distant space travel.