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CHEMM Intelligent Syndromes Tool (CHEMM-IST)
Question
Syndrome Prediction
- The scene is suspicious and/or a reasonably foreseeable setting for a chemical exposure.
- This assumes that an inhalation exposure has occurred and the chemical has not deposited on the skin.
- The focus is on the severe cases.
- The tool is for the basic life support (BLS) provider to use in a mass casualty incident.
- It can also be used by advanced life support (ALS) first responders and hospital first receivers.
CHEMM-IST Overview
The CHEMM Intelligent Syndromes Tool (CHEMM-IST) is an advanced form of "FALCON: A Decision Support System for Hazardous Materials Incidents and Terrorism Response." FALCON was developed through "knowledge engineering" at the James Madison University as an undergraduate thesis project by student James Brandon Shreckhise (2006 undergraduate project and also described in limited detail in one publication1). The key expert involved in the development of FALCON is medical toxicologist Dr. Mark Kirk, and Dr. Kirk has been involved with other experts in medicine and emergency response in the development of CHEMM-IST. Through a series of interviews by Mr. Shreckhise with Dr. Kirk during the development of FALCON, Dr. Kirk's diagnostic expertise was first modeled using decision trees. These decision trees were then engineered into IF-THEN rules and used to create a prototype expert system. CHEMM-IST started with the foundation of FALCON; however, CHEMM-IST's design and implementation is very different, and its development was primarily accomplished via several group discussions of physicians and emergency responders with the facilitation by CHEMM Team. CHEMM-IST's developers attended the group discussions to design and test CHEMM-IST in these interactive sessions.
References
- "Engineering a Medical Response Knowledge Base for FALCON: A Decision Support System for Hazardous Chemical Incidents." A Project Presented to the Faculty of the College of Integrated Science and Technology James Madison University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Bachelor of Arts by James Brandon Shreckhise. 2006.
- Frysinger SP , Deaton ML, Gonzalo AG, VanHorn AM, and Kirk MA . "The FALCON decision support system: Preparing communities for weapons of opportunity." Environmental Modelling & Software. 2007; 22:431-5.