Authors:
Luca Piovesan
1
;
Luca Anselma
1
and
Paolo Terenziani
2
Affiliations:
1
Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy
;
2
Università del Piemonte Orientale “Amedeo Avogadro”, Italy
Keyword(s):
Computer-interpretable Clinical Guidelines, Comorbidity Treatment, Guideline Interaction Detection, Ontology of Time and Interactions, Temporal Reasoning.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Decision Support Systems
;
Health Information Systems
Abstract:
Clinical practice guidelines are widely used to support physicians, but only on individual pathologies. On
the other hand, the treatment of patients affected by multiple diseases is one of the main challenges for the
modern healthcare. This requires the development of new methodologies, supporting physicians in the
detection of interactions between guidelines. In a previous work, we proposed a flexible and user-driven
approach, helping physicians in the detection of possible interactions between guidelines, supporting
focusing and analysis at multiple levels of abstractions. However, it did not cope with the fact that
interactions occur in time. For instance, the effects of two actions may potentially conflict, but practical
conflicts happen only if such effects overlap in time. In this paper, we extend the ontological model to deal
with the temporal aspects, and the detection algorithms to cope with them. Different types of facilities are
provided to physicians, supporting the analy
sis of interactions between both guidelines “per se”, and the
concrete application of guidelines to specific patients. In both cases, different temporal facilities are
provided to user physicians, based on Artificial Intelligence temporal reasoning techniques.
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