The General Hospital Corp.

Company Overview

The General Hospital Corp. (Massachusetts General Hospital) Laboratory of Computer Science (LCS) is a medical and bioinformatics R&D group. MGH/LCD developed DXplain, a decision support system that has the characteristics of both an electronic medical textbook and a medical reference system.

In its reference or case analysis mode, DXplain accepts a set of clinical findings (e.g., signs, symptoms, laboratory data) to produce a ranked list of diagnoses that might explain or be associated with the clinical manifestations. DXplain provides justification for why each of these diseases might be considered, suggests the kinds of further clinical information that might be useful to collect for each disease and lists which clinical manifestations, if any, would be unusual or atypical for each of the specific diseases.

Development of DXplain began in 1984, and the first version, with information on approximately 500 diseases, was released in 1986. The current DXplain knowledge base, which includes more than 2,300 diseases and more than 4,900 clinical findings (e.g., symptoms, signs, epidemiologic data, and laboratory, endoscopic and radiologic findings), is available to license holders over the Internet.