Temporal Constraints Approximation from Data about Medical Procedures

Proposing a treatment to patients is one of the physicians´ most common tasks. There are different elements that influence the decision of a physician to propose an appropriate treatment. Formal intervention plans (FIPs) are formal structures representing health care procedures to assist patients suffering from particular ailments or diseases. The introduction of temporal constraints in FIPs is a difficult task that physicians are not used to. This difficulty can be overcome with mechanisms to generate temporal constraints directly from the existing data on patient treatments. We have chosen the SDA formalism to represent FIPs. Here, our objective is to approximate time constraints from patient state transition sequences and as a generalization of the times assigned to each transition (or patient evolution). This approximation is used to construct the time dimension of FIPs.