Construction of the diagnostic encyclopedia workstation. Computerizing pathology for the pathologist.

The combination of a personal computer and a laser-vision disc player is an adroit tool for storing and retrieving textual information in combination with pictorial information. This paper describes such a system (a "diagnostic encyclopedia workstation"), which provides information to the pathologist engaged in daily diagnostic practice. The system contains a considerable amount of descriptive textual information that might be useful in making diagnoses in histopathology, along with many illustrations; the text is presented in a natural language (English). The descriptive information is divided into 18 categories, including such topics as histology, macroscopy, immunopathology and clinical data; each topic has a separate display in the system. Also present are two types of "decision rules" for making diagnoses (confirmative criteria for a diagnosis under consideration and exclusive criteria for many other diagnoses) and a classifying structure. The present version of this system contains information on about 100 diagnoses in ovarian pathology, illustrated with about 3,000 color slides from about 140 cases. The information and pictures are immediately available. Further characteristics of this system are its flexibility, accessibility and user friendliness; it has been structured so that components of artificial intelligence may be added later.