Medical plans as a middle step in building heart failure expert system

Abstract

Knowledge acquisition and presentation are important issues when constructing medical knowledge based systems. In this work medical plans are introduced as a solution for presentation of operational medical knowledge. Plans are not meant to be directly used by the actual decision support systems, but they are created as a middle step between medical doctors’ domain knowledge and computer system representation of that knowledge. They are graphical representations of procedures in specific medical domain, typically describing diagnosis and treatment of a certain disorder. They can be created and edited by medical doctors allowing them to express their vast, but often dispersed, knowledge in a systematic way. The goal is to enable technically sound transformation of medical knowledge into the form of rules or in a guideline modeling tool. The problem of treatment of heart failure disorder is used in this work to illustrate the concepts of medical plans and their application in a difficult real world problem.