The Stanford expert system that diagnosed blood infections in the 1970s was MYCIN.
Developed at Stanford University in the 1970s, MYCIN was designed to help identify certain bacterial infections and recommend antibiotics. It used a knowledge base of medical rules together with an inference engine that applied those rules to patient information. The system could also explain which rules contributed to a conclusion, an important feature for expert-system research.
MYCIN was not deployed as a routine hospital doctor. Its importance came from demonstrating how specialized knowledge could be represented computationally and used for decision support. Researchers also studied its uncertainty-handling methods because medical information is often incomplete.
The name is sometimes mistaken for DENDRAL, another Stanford expert system. DENDRAL analyzed chemical data, while MYCIN focused on infectious diseases. MYCIN’s work helped establish expert systems as a major branch of symbolic AI before machine learning became dominant.