Model-based application: The Galen Structured Clinical User Interface

Researchers in the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine community are facing the challenge to design and develop clinical systems which are intuitive to use and adequately expressive. This paper reports on a Structured Clinical User Interface (SCUI) which achieves this goal by using technologies developed in the Galen project: a new formalism to represent models of terminology coupled with a server to access and use this knowledge. This approach opens the way to the development of clinical systems which use conceptual knowledge, driven by models of terminology, in a dynamic and flexible way. Furthermore, the overall task of building a clinical application is separated into a terminological part handled by the server and an application part handled by application developers without needing to worry about implementing the terminology. The SCUI is specifically developed and tested in the context of infectious diseases to satisfy the demands made by the medical intensive care unit to the Geneva Hospital's microbiology laboratory.