[The development and the applications of clinical laboratory system by using of fuzzy set theory]

For clinical laboratory data to be used effectively in wide areas of clinical medicine, it must be stored in proper database systems. Moreover, the system must be installed in the hospital information system for easy access by the hospital staff in their routine activities. From this standpoint we have developed a clinical test relational database system at Hiroshima University Hospital, which provides the functions of easy on-line retrieval and statistical analysis. We have also improved the functions to incorporate fuzzy query processing based on the theory of fuzzy sets. This system enables us to use natural linguistic representation and leads to a medical knowledge-base.