A Rule-Based Expert System for Vaginal Cytology Diagnosis

Vaginal cytologies are usually first checked by an expert medical laboratory technician, that is specifically dedicated to this sort of diagnosis. The cytology is only redirected to the pathologist if the diagnosis is not clear. Training these medical laboratory technicians is a long process. They have to observe many microphotographs and many real cytologies on the microscope till the required expertise is achieved. Developing this work was suggested by the third author, a just retired (2014) anatomo–pathology Professor, that suggested the possibility to somehow store his long experience working as pathologist and teacher of anatomo–pathology. The first two authors considered that it was possible to develop a Rule–Based Expert System (RBES) that tried to synthesize this knowledge and could be used as a trainer, as well as an aid for decision making by medical laboratory technician specialized in vaginal cytology. The final version will include microphotographs of real cases as illustration of all steps. The first step was to organize the knowledge in the form of a flow–chart. Once the flow–chart was constructed we thought about how to navigate through it and decided that it would be a good idea to develop a RBES that guided the user along the complex flow diagram. We decided to implement it using an algebraic inference engine (that used Groebner bases) because of our experience with this approach. We did choose the computer algebra system CoCoA for the implementation.

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