Consistency Checking of Clinical Practice Guidelines with MITDL

Since a Clinical Practice Guideline describes thediagnosis and treatment process of a disease, designers of suchguidelines should ensure their logical consistency. A formalapproach for modeling them provides a basis for some usefulreasoning (e.g., satisfiability checking). In this paper, we describea metric interval-based temporal description logic, which issuitable for modeling the dynamic aspect of a domain and the themedical ontologies. We also propose a tableau-based algorithmfor checking the satisfiability of such guidelines, to assure theirlogical consistency. We explain the process of encoding a reallifeguideline, the Treatment of Tuberculosis , and presenta situation where designers can use our logic and associatedsatisfiability algorithm to detect an inconsistency in the guidelinefor patients with Cirrhosis disease.

Keywords:

Clinical Practice Guidelines , Metric Interval-based Temporal Logic , Description Logic , Guideline Modeling , atisfiability Checking