A Diagnosis Support System for Veterinary Necropsy based on Bayesian Networks

Veterinary autopsy requires a high level of expertise and skills that not all veterinarians necessarily master, especially in the context of the desertification of rural areas. The development of support systems is a challenging issue, since such a tool, to be considered relevant and accepted by practitioners in their diagnosis process, must avoid any black box effect. The diagnosis support system we introduce here, IVAN ("Innovative Veterinary Assisted Necropsy"), aims to engage the user in an explicit, understandable, validable and reviewable process, able to cope with the specific issues of cattle necropsy. Besides, it provides uncertainty management to deal with approximate lesion descriptions. IVAN relies on a Bayesian network to infer relevant proposals at each step of the diagnostic process. IVAN was trained on a set of real autopsy cases from autopsy reports, and its performance was assessed using another set of reports. In addition, the tool had to provide results in short response time and be able to run the application on mobile device and web server. In addition to demonstrating the feasibility of the approach, IVAN is a first step towards other support systems in other species and in broader contexts than autopsy.