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 results show that the students who were taught by an instructor using TMT to provide the instructional environment went from 0 percent correct on a pretest case to 87 percent correct on posttests (n = 15). This increase compares with an improvement rate of 20 percent by a control group (n = 15) who used a passive version of the system with the tutoring functions turned off.

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. It also evaluates the effects of these alternative designs on the ability of the users to effectively stay "in the loop," applying their own expertise and judgment while using the computer as a tool to assist with their analyses. A pilot study was conducted involving 32 certified medical technologists, which compared two alternative roles for the computer: (1) use of the computer to automatically complete subtasks upon request, and (2) use of the computer as a monitoring device to critique technologists as they completed the analyses themselves. The system design that automatically completed subtasks for the technologist induced a 29 percent increase in errors relative to the design that critiqued technologists as they completed the analyses themselves.

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. This article describes the concepts behind the design of TMT.