| Abstract |
Clinical guidelines (CG) are generic recommendations developed in order to guide the physicians on the prescriptions of treatment, diagnoses or prevention plans to a specific patient according to its health condition. Since CGs are originally published in natural language, much effort have been done on translating them to a computer-interpretable format (CIG) such that they can be used, for example, in a Decision Support System. Some languages and methods have been proposed but there are yet many challenges to be addressed, such as reusing and sharing information, updating information, adapting the guidelines to rules that holds specifically for countries or hospitals, composing recommendations from different guidelines (due to comorbidity), find incompatibilities among recommendations, and taking into account patient preferences or conditions to prescribe the plan. My research proposal is to address (some of) the aforementioned challenges (ideally) reusing most of what have already been done and, in particular, understanding how semantic web technologies can be applied.
I have done some literature review and I have produced a preliminary model/ontology based on study of real clinical guidelines, related foundational theories and CIG languages (also having in mind the aforementioned challenges). Therefore, I will present about the issues that have being identified and ideas on how to address some of them. |