Pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence in medicine, Shortliffe is best known as the principal developer of the clinical expert system MYCIN, one of the first rule-based artificial intelligence expert systems, which obtained clinical data interactively from a physician user and was used to diagnose and recommend treatment for severe infections.
While never used in practice—because it preceded the era of local-area networking and could not be integrated with patient records and physician workflow—its performance was shown to be comparable to and sometimes more accurate than that of Stanford infectious disease faculty. This spurred the development of a wide range of activity in rule-based expert systems, knowledge representation, belief nets, and other areas, and Shortliffe's design greatly influenced the subsequent development of computing in medicine.
