KNOWLEDGE-BASE OF HEPAXPERT-I - AUTOMATED INTERPRETATION OF HEPATITIS-A AND HEPATITIS-B SEROLOGY

The knowledge base of Hepaxpert-I, a medical expert system for interpr etive analysis of hepatitis A and B serologic findings, contains 13 ru les for hepatitis A and 106 rules for hepatitis B serology. Formally, the construction of the knowledge base was done by forming a partition of the sets of possible serologic finding patterns -64 for hepatitis A and 4096 for hepatitis B serology - induced by an equivalence relati on, divides the elements of the sets into disjoint subsets, the equiva lence classes. Each equivalence class is represented as one If-Then ru le that assigns to every member of the equivalence class one interpret ive text. The partition of the possible finding patterns into equivale nce classes and the disposal of one and only one interpretive text for each equivalence class made the creation of a very practical and effi cient computer program for the precise interpretation of any finding p attern of serologic tests for hepatitis A and B possible. The complete set of the provided If-Then rules is represented in this paper.