According to Clerici & Veneroni (2014) the diagnostic process, therefore, results in three moments.
The first moment is the anamnesis, which consists of a thorough investigation of the patient's medical history, questioned directly, or inferred from family members' descriptions. It is focused on patient's data collection, regarding both remote and recent familiar and personal history and physiological and pathological history.
The second moment is named semeiotics. It consists of a patient examination aimed at finding symptoms and signs, which can guide the clinician toward possible pathological hypotheses.
The third moment, differential diagnosis, consists of the evaluation of the clinical frame and the following analogical comparison of it to those of pathologies characterized by the same signs and symptoms.
Reaching a diagnosis, can be difficult as many signs and symptoms are not specific to a single pathology. To implement an effective distinction between similar pathologies, the various diagnostic hypotheses are progressively eliminated on the basis of presence or absence of characteristic symptoms and signs. In this phase the elective instruments are: a proper medical history, physical examination, and laboratory tests.
There are at least five areas of clinical psychology, and two of general use, in which it would be possible to develop true expert systems (Del Corno, Lang, 2004).
The first area concerns the use of expert systems in cognitive assessment.
Psychologists are currently developing relatively accurate formal models of cognitive ability, it should then be possible to translate these models into an expert system which, in turn, would generate a psychological description of the patient's cognitive state. It might also be able to combine the assessment of these abilities in a wide range of areas, so as to draw up a comprehensive description of the test subject's
intellectual functions.
A second area is that of neuropsychological diagnosis. The expert systems used in the more general field of medical and psychiatric diagnosis provide an obvious model in this area as well. In addition, the kind of neurological approach that has been taken has generated, quite naturally, much material suitable for inclusion in an expert system.
A third area of application of expert systems in psychology concerns the assessment
of skills in career guidance. In this area, also, the opportunity could be offered to
make use of an expert system based on a theoretical model of selection and orientation, which would carry out the assessment of a client and then provide them with some advice about their career opportunities.
The fourth area and the fifth area are concerned with the effects of drug use and eating disorders on the behavior of individuals. In both of these areas there is such a conspicuous amount of detailed information that they are extremely difficult to organize or to link to particular clinical concepts. In the literature review, it was found that no expert system for diagnosis was developed after DSM IV (Nunes, Pinheiro & Pequeno, 2009), in the meantime the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was updated (2013). The development of DSM V in a short time was accompanied by the launch of an app. However, this aid is projected for the consultation of diagnostic criteria, but does not allow data entry and does not generate output, unlike expert systems. The latest contemporary frontier of diagnostic aid is that mediated by smartphone technology. Apps are the evolution of expert systems and can aid in diagnosis
because they can analyze a range of data not only in terms of symptoms, but also biomarkers. The pros and cons of adopting these systems in both clinical practice, health care organizations, and individual well-being are addressed. Some issues relate to global mental health, early diagnosis and treatment. Other ethical aspects include privacy issues and the risk of self-diagnosis and self-medication, which are discussed.