Temporal reasoning for decision support in medicine

Objective: Handling time-related concepts is essential in medicine. During it can make a substantial difference to know the temporal order in which symptoms occurred or for how long they lasted. During prognosis the evolutions of a disease are conceived as a description of events unfolding in In therapy planning the different steps of treatment must be applied in a order, with a given frequency and for a certain span of time in order to be This article offers a survey on the use of temporal reasoning for decision related tasks in medicine. Material and methods: Key publications of the area, mainly circumscribed to latest two decades, are reviewed and classified according to three important stages patient treatment requiring decision support: diagnosis, prognosis and planning/management. Other complementary publications, like those on tered information storage and retrieval, are also considered as they provide support to the above mentioned three stages. Results: Key areas are highlighted and used to organize the latest contributions. survey of previous research is followed by an analysis of what can still be improved what is needed to make the next generation of decision support systems for more effective. Conclusions: It can be observed that although the area has been developed, there are still areas where more research is needed to make systems of widespread use in decision support-retated areas of medicine. suggestions for further exploration are proposed as a result of the survey. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.