Extracting Qualitative Knowledge from Medical Guidelines for Clinical Decision-Support Systems

Medical guidelines provide knowledge about processes that is not directly suitable for building clinical decision-support systems. We discuss a two-step approach where knowledge from a guideline on COPD is translated into temporal logic, and augmented with physiological background knowledge. This allows capturing the dynamics of the processes using qualitative knowledge, while maintaining the temporal nature of the processes. As a second step, this represented clinical knowledge is translated into a decision-theoretic framework. We thus present a representation that can act as a basis for the construction of a decision-support system concerning monitoring of COPD.