Knowledge acquisition environment for the design of a decision support system: application in blood transfusion.

Blood transfusion is a medical domain where decision support systems (DSSs) could be very helpful to the physicians but must easily and continuously be maintained. We have developed a knowledge acquisition tool that allows the construction and the maintenance of such a system by the domain expert. The methodology used could be applied to another highly evolutive medical domain. In this paper, we detail our knowledge acquisition tool, its use and the final DSS obtained, which is fully integrated into our hospital information network.