Dealing with brittleness in the design of expert systems for immunohematology.

In recent years, there has been increased discussion about the potential of expert systems to support medical decision-making tasks, including applications in clinical laboratory settings. This study provides data regarding the cognitive errors that technologists make on an important problem-solving task: the identification of antibodies in a patient's blood. It explores alternative designs for expert systems developed to reduce such errors.

Empirical evaluation of the transfusion medicine tutor.

Previous research during the development of Antibody IDentification Assistant (AIDA) revealed that many medical technology students and other laboratory personnel have serious difficulties in determining the specificity of blood group alloantibodies, especially weak or multiple antibodies. Based on these previous results, AIDA was modified to provide a teaching environment for medical technology students. We report the results of a rigorous, objective evaluation of the resultant system, the Transfusion Medicine Tutor (TMT).

The use of computers in teaching clinical laboratory science.

The Transfusion Medicine Tutor (TMT) has been designed to study the use of computers in teaching concepts and problem- solving skills important in the field of clinical laboratory science. This system provides students with an opportunity to gain experience by solving a wide range of actual cases, and coaches these students when they are having difficulties. This system is designed specifically to detect and respond to a variety of errors that students may make while solving cases, and to suggest more advanced problem-solving methods when appropriate.

An empirical evaluation of the performance of antibody identification tasks.

Four empirical studies were conducted for better understanding of the nature of problem-solving activities by medical technologists and medical technology students when performing antibody identification tasks. The results indicated the importance of strategies that ensure the collection of converging evidence, as these strategies protect against the fallibility of commonly used heuristics and against errors due to simple slips. The results also indicate that not only do students make significant numbers of errors, but so do practicing technologists.

Procedural errors in antibody identification.

In experimental studies of students and line technologists performing antibody identification procedures, both groups made errors. These errors included, at times, either failing to identify an antibody or misidentifying the specficity(ies)A. prospective study was undertaken to identify errors made in a laboratory setting.