Formal description of disease courses

Patient case analysis is an elementary and crucial process clinicians are confronted with daily. The importance and complexity is reflected in the need to discuss individual patient cases in clinicopathological conferences and the documentation of more than 70 000 patient cases in MEDLINE. This paper introduces DCGL, a technique to model disease course descriptions as present in medical literature. DCGL enables advanced computerised matching of generic disease course descriptions with individual patient case descriptions, a basic function in computerised patient case analysis.