Validation of laboratory data is the last step before the results are transmitted to the clinicians. This is a time consuming job, which can be aided by artificial intelligence techniques. VALAB is a decision-making expert system for automatic biological validation of laboratory results. The decision produced by VALAB is based on several factors, correlation between repeated tests, physiological association between tests, patient’s age and gender and hospital department from which the test was ordered.
Over 25.000 rules are combined through an inference engine to reproduce human reasoning in the complex biological validation process. The VALAB database contains rules for 126 parameters in 4 different, but correlated, fields: Biochemistry, Blood gas, Haematology and Coagulation.
The user cannot modify the rules but is able to personalize the default settings to optimise automated validation to their patient population.
Furthermore VALAB now contains an Auto Expert module, this gives the user the possibility to create their own rules for new tests and additional specialities alongside the original modules. No knowledge of programming is necessary as the approach of modelling is very intuitive.
