Expert systems as an aid for the pathologist's role of clinical consultant: CANCER-STAGE.

The traditional role of the pathologist as a clinical consultant for various clinical specialists has become more difficult with the explosion of information that has taken place in the past decades. Rule-based expert systems offer the ability to store and quickly and efficiently retrieve information that is relevant to specific clinical situations. They are ideally suited for simple repetitive tasks such as the staging of patients with cancer and the retrieval of therapeutic and prognostic information. A microcomputer-based expert system, CANCER-STAGE, is described that allows a pathologist to perform these tasks with minimal computer training. The system was constructed by utilizing an inexpensive expert system development package (EXSYS). The knowledge base from the literature is stored in 370 IF-THEN rules that have notes with therapeutic information and references. The computer user interacting with the system answers questions and is quickly provided with the TNM stage of a particular patient and a short summary with therapeutic options. The conditions can be changed and the results of various WHAT-IF simulations compared for educational purposes.