Applying Temporal Abstraction in Medical Information Systems

Department of Information Systems EngineeringBen Gurion University, Beer Sheva 84105, Israelmira@cs.bgu.ac.il{dboaz,yshahar}@bgumail.bgu.ac.ilAbstract—Physicians and medical decision-support ap-plications, such as for diagnosis, therapy, monitoring,quality assessment, and clinical research, reason aboutpatients in terms of abstract, clinically meaningful con-cepts, typically over significant time periods. Clinicaldatabases, however, store only raw, time-stamped data.Thus, there is a need to bridge this gap. We introducethe Temporal Abstraction Language (TAR) which enablesspecification of abstract relations involving raw data andabstract concepts, and use it for defining typical medicalabstraction patterns. For each pattern we further analyzefiniteness properties of the answer set. The TAR languageis implemented as the reasoning module in a practicaldiagnosis system.Index Terms—temporal reasoning, temporal databases,temporal query languages, knowledge-based systems andknowledge representation, medical informatics and tem-poral abstraction.