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Biomedical subjects

J R Svirbely

Publications and source records attributed to J R Svirbely.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

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. In one of the studies covering a 1-year period, for instance, a group of 16 technologists made a total of 41 errors in 1057 cases. On the basis of these findings, several alternatives are proposed to reduce errors.

Adult

Qualitative representation of behavior in the medical domain.

In medical knowledge-based systems, there is a need for models of the human body which can predict and explain behavior based on qualitative information about the structure and behavior of the body. We present a framework for representing the structure and behavior of physical systems and apply it to the human cardiovascular system. Our framework allows for hierarchical representation of physical systems and facilitates two kinds of reasoning processes: composition of behaviors and qualitative simulation.

Artificial Intelligence

RED: a red-cell antibody identification expert module.

We describe a software module in an expert system RED, which interprets data related to red cell antibody identification. There are three portions to this module: the problem-solving component, which incorporates the knowledge required for antibody identification as a hierarchy of programs. The programs in the hierarchy organize within themselves small pieces of knowledge represented in the form of production rules, which are capable of making judgments concerning a specific hypothesis; an intelligent data base for storage of patient data, red cell attributes, and test results; the "overview critic" portion, which combines the atomic hypotheses judged favorably by the antibody programs into a unified judgment concerning the case. Overview makes the decision to terminate processing with a conclusion about which antibodies are actually present and what specific further tests need to be performed to resolve any remaining ambiguities.

Artificial Intelligence

Filamentous Histoplasma capsulatum endocarditis involving mitral and aortic valve porcine bioprostheses.

We report a case of histoplasmosis capsulati endocarditis simultaneously infecting a mitral and aortic porcine bioprostheses. Histologically, the fungus demonstrated a diversity of morphologies, ranging from typical, intracellular, 2- to 5-micron yeast cells, to septate and branching hyphae, to bizarre hyphae with vesicular swellings. Cultures obtained from both valves were positive in four days. The combination of unexpected histologic appearance and rapid growth in culture may pose problems in diagnosis.

Aortic Valve