[Current computerized support for vestibular function tests.I. Expert systems and their clinical applications].

Expert Systems are a new method developed by the branch of Computer Science known as Artificial Intelligence in order to make available the knowledge and the expertise of the specialists in a certain domain of the science to other operators in the same field. Most of their applications belong to the medical domain. In this paper the main features of the expert systems are briefly described. As an example the structure and the characteristics of the shell EXPERT (Weiss and Kulikowski, 1979) are presented in detail. This shell has already been used to develop several expert systems. It is the tool by which we constructed a consultation system (VERTIGO) aimed to classify different types of vertigo.