Knowledge engineering in quantitative histopathology

Ongoing research on a system for the automated evaluation of digitized images of histopathologic sections is described. The system comprises an ultrafast laser scanner microscope capable of recording image data at 64 Mhz in each of two wavelength channels, and a multiprocessor computer containing thirty-six Motorola 68000 processing elements. The operating system allows an image-data-driven dynamic reconfiguration of the computer architecture; this reconfiguration is based on prior knowledge of the histopathologic sections to be processed. Knowledge engineering methods are used extensively as development tools in the development of an expert system-controlled scene segmentation, processing task scheduling, in the diagnostic expert system module, and its validation procedures.