Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorting (FACS) is a major source of information for biomedical research and clinical practice. Basic and clinical FACS studies are important to research in AIDS, cancer, and rheumatological diseases. However, use of the FACS instrument is hampered by a need for greater skills in FACS experiment protocol design, instrument operation, and data analysis. Developing a FACS workstation environment will facilitate FACS use by reducing the need for on-site human expertise. The application of recent research and development in medical informatics will allow a new level of automatic control for complex devices, helping to move FACS technology into clinical research use. We have developed the infrastructure for an expert workstation-PENGUIN-under the initial grant and with associated support from computer science and electrical engineering resources. Data from a genetics database server can be accessed on workstations as object-oriented structures. Updates from workstations can be reflected in the central database. Application development on the workstation is facilitated by our adoption of the X Windows interface standard. Our next goal is to make the workstations into effective tools for designing and executing FACS protocols.
The specific aims are to: 1) Build a knowledge-based protocol critiquing tool which encodes the expertise of the staff of the Herzenberg Laboratory; 2) Develop a reagent inventory- control module to complement the first task: 3) Develop an experiment management system for the FLUOROSKAN instrument, another technology used in biomedical research; 4) Improve and extend the current user interface to provide support for FACS instrumentation; 5) Augment the HELP facility available during FACS operation to assist in proper execution of the experiment; and, 6) Refine data analysis and display techniques to support the increasing mass of information available from FACS experiments.
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