Clinical assessment of the knowledge base of an expert system for data analysis in laboratory medicine.

Despite the apparent demand for a consultation system, only a few expert systems have been developed for laboratory medicine. Some studies on the diagnostic precision of such systems have been reported, but the efficiency of their knowledge bases has not yet been investigated. An expert system, named BLOOD, for data analysis in a hematology laboratory, which is written in C-Prolog and runs on VAX-station, has already been reported to have excellent diagnostic reliability and ability to cope with the fuzziness involved in clinical diagnostic procedures. A quantitative examination of the knowledge base of BLOOD using real laboratory data from 58 patients diagnosed as having iron deficiency anemia clearly revealed the verbosity of the knowledge base, and proved that it was effective for obtaining a group of essential diagnostic rules.