Expert system
An early form of AI built from hand-coded rules, like 1970s systems MYCIN and INTERNIST. Powerful in narrow tests but brittle: it cannot handle anything it was not explicitly programmed for.
A hospital's sepsis alert is a set of hand-written rules in the record system that fires when heart rate, temperature, white blood cell count and lactate cross fixed thresholds. It has no rule for patients on a beta blocker, whose heart rate may stay normal, so it fires late for them, and nobody has updated it since the committee that wrote it disbanded years ago. Before adding rules or replacing it with a learned model, name an owner for the rule set, list each rule with its source and date, and review it every year against current guidance and local alert data.
Terms like this come up in real clinical scenarios across the HelloAI courses: bite-sized modules with verifiable certificates. An account takes one minute, no password needed.
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