Implementation of an expert system to determine eligibility and priorities for bone marrow transplants

The Bone Marrow Transplant Unit (BMTU) (Serviço de Transplante de Medula Ossea) at HC-UFPR, in Curitiba, Brazil, commonly receives a large number of candidates for bone marrow transplants (BMT). Managing information on the BMTU's waiting list is extremely complex and vital to services as eligibility and priorities are established with implications on both pre and post transplant survival. Consequently, physicians working at the BMTU have to regularly evaluate each candidate to determine his or her eligibility and priority for a BMT. This report describes the implementation of an expert system (ES) in aiding the assessment of candidates for BMT. The ES prototype was created as a means to help healthcare providers define eligibility and priority by using production rules and the Bayesian net (BN). Some factors contributed a lot to test and to validate the systems of this project. Real cases were tested, therefore BMTU presents a database (DB) with all the patients that are awaiting transplant. The system was capable of determining all the patients' eligibility with the diagnosis of Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML) and to indicate transplant priority.