University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Department of Pathology
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
James H. Harrison, Jr., MD, PhD

LabScanner is a simple data mining application that is designed for use by pathologists and clinical laboratory personnel. It stores user-defined rules and uses them to scan flat ascii or tab-delimited text files of clinical laboratory test results downloaded from laboratory information systems. The rules identify simple temporal patterns in the test results that are clinically meaningful, such as increasing or decreasing trends, multiple values out of defined ranges, defined testing frequencies, and defined levels of variability in results. "Found" patients can be displayed graphically or graphical reports may be printed, and statistical summary of rule performance is available. LabScanner is expected to be useful for quality assurance studies and case finding for followup or teaching, and in the appropriate setting it might prove useful in a clinical pathology consult service.

LabScanner is copyrighted, but is being made available free of charge to the Pathology community for experimentation and testing.