Formal description of temporal knowledge in case reports

Patient case analysis is an elementary and crucial process which clinicians are daily confronted with. The importance and complexity is reflected in the need to discuss cases in clinicopathological conferences and the documentation of more than 70 000 patient cases in MEDLINE. This paper introduces a generic patient case report language (PCRL) based on general medical temporal concepts to formalise temporal knowledge as present in case descriptions. The lack of such a generic technique is reflected by the fact that computers are very restrictive in accepting patient specific temporal information. Acceptance is almost always controlled and guided by specific predefined disease or treatment models. We strive for a case library consisting of unambiguous patient case descriptions formulated independent from future use.