As in software product lifecycle, the effort spent in maintaining medical knowledge in guidelines can be reduced, if modularization, formalization and tracking of domain knowledge are employed across the guideline development phases. We propose to exploit and combine knowledge templates with medical background knowledge from existing thesauri in order to produce reusable building blocks used in guideline development. These templates enable easier guideline formalization, by describing how chunks of medical knowledge can be combined into more complex ones and how they are linked to a textual representation. By linking our ontology used in guideline formalization with existing thesauri, we can use compilations of thesauri knowledge as building blocks for modeling and maintaining the content of a medical guideline. Our paper investigates whether medical knowledge acquired from several medical thesauri can be molded on a guideline pattern, such that it supports building of executable models of guidelines. Keywords: Linguistic and Control Patterns, Guideline Modelling and Formalization. Evidence-based clinical guidelines, representing disseminated state-of-the-art medical practice, undergo frequent changes due to new research results, and require permanent maintenance, similar to that required in a software project. Existing guideline modeling languages and guideline formalization frameworks ([4, 16, 12]) only use to a limited extent the rich medical knowledge present in medical thesauri to facilitate formalization, i.e. producing an operational model of the guideline. Recent research ([11]) advocate a Software Engineering view of the problem of guideline formalization: the requirements, the literature sources and their supporting medical background knowledge are captured explicitly in a medical guideline project, in which several control components of the formalized guideline are linked to their corresponding textual representation in the guidelines and can be traced back to the medical knowledge they were derived from. This is based on the hypothesis that certain lexical similarities exist between all instances of a guideline component, and can be mapped to the same formalized representation, and that identifying lexical similarities between guideline texts is relatively easier and cheaper to perform than producing the formalized equivalent of the text from scratch. Even though some guidelines contain program-like actions advising on the most effective and safe medical practice in complex clinical situations, they are much less structured than a software program and lack a structured method for change management.
Furthermore, they combined these patterns with medical domain knowledge from existing medical thesauri (MeSH and NCI) into an ontology REF .
Exploiting thesauri knowledge in medical guideline formalization
Methods of information in medicine
Methods of information in medicine
Computer Science Medicine