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Summary: 1
Towards a Comprehensive Treatment of Repetitions, Periodicity and
Temporal Constraints in Clinical Guidelines
Paolo Terenziani*, Luca Anselma%
, Stefania Montani*, Alessio Bottrighi*
*DI, Univ. del Piemonte Orientale "Amedeo Avogadro"
Spalto Marengo 33, 15100 Alessandria, Italy
Phone: +39 0131 360174 E-mail: {terenz,stefania,alessio.bottrighi}@mfn.unipmn.it
%DI, Università di Torino, Corso Svizzera 185, 10149 Torino, Italy
Phone: +39 011 6706821 E-mail: anselma@di.unito.it
Abstract
Temporal constraints play a fundamental role in clinical guidelines. For example, temporal indeterminacy, constraints
about duration, delays between actions, and periodic repetitions of actions are essential in order to cope with clinical
therapies. In this paper, we propose a computer-based approach to represent temporal constraints in clinical guidelines
and reason (i.e., perform inferences in the form of constraint propagation) with them. We first propose a temporal
representation formalism and two constraint propagation algorithms operating on it, and then we show how they can
be exploited in order to provide clinical guideline systems with different temporal facilities. Our approach offers
several advantages: for example, during the guideline acquisition phase, it enables to represent temporal constraints,
and to check their consistency; during the execution phase, it allows to check the consistency between action
execution-times and the constraints in the guidelines, and to provide query-answering and temporal constraint
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