Conformance Analysis of Execution Traces with Clinical Guidelines and Basic Medical Knowledge in Answer Set Programming

Clinical Guidelines (CGs) are developed for specifying the “best” clinical procedures for specific clinical circumstances. However, a CG is executed on a specific patient, with her peculiarities, and in a specific context, with its limitations and constraints. Physicians have to use Basic Medical Knowledge (BMK) in order to adapt the general CG to each specific case, even if the interplay between CGs and the BMK can be very complex. In this paper, we focus on a posteriori analysis of conformance, intended as the adherence of an observed CG execution trace to CG and BMK knowledge. A CG description in the GLARE language is mapped to Answer Set Programming (ASP); the BMK and conformance rules are also represented in ASP, to perform conformance analysis, identifying non-adherence situations to CG and/or BMK, which must ultimately be evaluated by a physician in order to assess whether a trace can be considered as conformant or not.