ECAI 2004 Conference Paper

[full paper]

Mapping clinical guidelines representation primitives to decision theory concepts

Stefania Montani, Paolo Terenziani

Supporting therapy selection is a fundamental task for a system for computerized management of clinical guidelines (GL). To this hand, decision theory issues could provide significant advances. In this paper, we propose a systematic analysis of the main GL representation primitives, and of how they could be related to decision theory issues. The knowledge representation contribution we provide can be seen as a basis for implementing a decision support tool within any of the systems described in the literature: as a matter of fact, at a sufficiently abstract level, the GL primitives we treat are shared by all of the systems. Such a tool could be adopted when executing a GL on a single patient (in clinical practice), and for simulation purposes. In particular, a decision theory tool based on this analysis is being implemented in the system GLARE.

Keywords: knowledge representation, clinical guidelines, decision support, decision theory

Citation: Stefania Montani, Paolo Terenziani: Mapping clinical guidelines representation primitives to decision theory concepts. In R.López de Mántaras and L.Saitta (eds.): ECAI2004, Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2004, pp.1063-1064.