ABSTRACT

The primary goal of expert systems research is to make expertise available to decision makers and technicians who need answers quickly. There is never enough expertise to go around certainly it is not always available at the right place and the right time. The research methodology for this study was based on the usage patterns of expert systems in clinical pathology with data obtained from Federal Medical Center Umuahia, the use and implementation of expert systems in medical diagnosis am within the professional medical community. The research work is limited to three tropical diseases Typhoid, Cholera and Malaria. The application being web based oflèrs instant diagnosis to the mentioned ailments. The application "WebDoc" is designed with Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Technology because of the powerful features it oilers which include; Easy development, advanced security features, less cost and well-structured database security. The basic components of J2EE use design of this application are, The JSPs; which is used to design the user interface, The Serviettes; which extends the functionality of a web server also routes request to the appropriate classes and the Java Classes; which handles specific functions in the application. The classes handle the creation of users (either ordinary user or health professional user), Connection to database, user logon and diagnosis. The design methodology used in the development of this application is Object Oriented Design (OOB). This simplifies the development of the application in that the application can be designed in modules or classes and each class can be called up to perform its on task independently.