From Checking Integrity Constraints to Temporal Abstraction for Clinical Databases

Temporal abstraction (TA) methods aim to extract more meaningful data from raw temporal data. The use of temporal abstraction is important for decision support applications which consume abstract concepts, while databases usually contain primitive concepts. In this paper we propose a new approach for TA which has a tight coupling with the temporal integrity constraints checking (TICC) stage. The preceding TICC stage not only ensures the consistency of the raw data stored in the temporal database but also prepares appropriate datasets for the TA stage. The approach has been applied to the clinical database system for monitoring the treatment of patients who have colorectal cancer.