Temporal reasoning and temporal data maintenance in medicine: Issues and challenges

Carlo Combi, Yuval Shahar
1997 Computers in Biology and Medicine  
We present a brief, nonexhaustive overview of research efforts in designing and developing timeoriented systems in medicine. The growing volume of research on time-oriented systems in medicine can be viewed from either an application point of view, focusing on different generic tasks (e.g., diagnosis) and clinical areas (e.g., cardiology), or from a methodological point of view, distinguishing among different theoretical approaches. In this overview, we focus on highlighting methodological and
more » ... heoretical choices, and conclude with suggestions for new research directions. Two main research directions can be noted: Temporal reasoning, which supports various temporal inference tasks (e.g., temporal abstraction, time-oriented decision support, forecasting, data validation), and temporal data maintenance, which deals with storage and retrieval of data that have heterogeneous temporal dimensions. Efforts common to both research areas include the modeling of time, of temporal entities, and of temporal queries. We suggest that tasks such as abstraction of time-oriented data and the handling of different temporal-granularity levels should provide common ground for collaboration between the two research directions and fruitful areas for future research.
doi:10.1016/s0010-4825(96)00010-8 pmid:9397339 fatcat:hsh77ztjovbjpgvriqtsxmt7hy