XPCOAG: an expert system for differential diagnosis of coagulation disorders

• Abstract:
  This system features a unique frequency based knowledge-base and an innovative dynamic-interactive inference process. The knowledge-base includes 41 coagulation disorders. A total of 83 attributes were selected as essential data in diagnosis of coagulation disorders. This expert system has been successfully validated using 61 documented cases of coagulation disorders. This expert system for laboratory diagnosis of hemostatic disorders is hopefully the prototype of more powerful tools which can be integrated to the laboratory information systems in the future laboratory. They may be extremely useful in assisting medical students and pathology residents in independent study as well as in preliminary clinical consultation.
  
  
• Development platforms:
  The inference engine of XPCOAG was implemented with the XP shell. The graphic user interface of XPHEMO was designed with Borland Object Vision (Borland, Santa Cruz, California).
  
  Before beginning this project, we developed a version of our expert system shell, XP (for eXPert), for general applications. This shell was written in Borland Turbo C language and was run on a Microsoft Windows 3.1 platform (Microsoft, Seattle, Washington)on an IBM-compatible computer. This shell has also been ported to other software platforms, including Microsoft Visual C++ and ANSI C, and other operating systems, including UNIX and Microsoft DOS. The XP shell is rule-based, and its inference engine uses a backward-chaining search strategy to draw conclusions.
  
  
• Publication:
  Nguyen, A.N.D. and Uthman, M.: XPCOAG: A Teaching Software for Laboratory Diagnosis of Coagulation Disorders. Laboratory Medicine, Vol 25, No. 6, pp 399-401, June 1994

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