[Tutor] Medical Decision-Making Question

[Fred G]

Hello--

I'm a pre-med student interested in decision-making as applied to medical
decisions.  I am trying to build a medical decision-making algorithm and am
pretty stuck on a few things.

I've built a file that contains a list of many diseases and their associated
symptoms.  For example, here are the column headers and two sample rows (the
"|" = "or"):
Disease                Symptoms
Cold
sore_throat|runny_nose|congestion|cough|aches|slight_fever
Flu
sore_throat|fever|headache|muscle_aches|soreness|congestion|cough|returning_fever

My questions are the following:
a)  How's the best way to make it so I can have a user type in a list of
symptoms and then have the computer tell the user the possible diseases that
share those symptoms? In other words, on a high-level I have a pretty good
idea of what I want my algorithm to do-- but I need help implementing the
basic version first.  I'd like to do the following:
>>>Please enter a list of symptoms
>>>[user_input]
>>>Possible diseases include: x, y, z

b)Once I get that working, could anyone point me to good code already
written in Python such that I could have a model (for syntax and overall
structure) for figuring out how to make the computer evaluate more factors
such as: patient age, patient history, and even downloading archival data
for patients in the same demographic group?

Thanks!
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