Towards a comprehensive treatment of temporal constraints in clinical guidelines

In this paper, we focus on an application and extension of artificial intelligence temporal reasoning techniques in order to represent and reason with temporal constraints in clinical guidelines. Particular attention is dedicated to the treatment of repeated (periodic) events, which play a major role in clinical therapies. We also discuss some limitations of our current approach, highlighting possible future enhancements. The work in this paper has been developed in the GLARE project, meant to realize a prototype of a domain-independent manager of clinical guidelines. The GLARE system has been built in cooperation with Azienda Ospedaliera S. Giovanni Battista of Turin, and has been successfully tested on different clinical domains.