Visual Representation Of Clinical Guidelines Based On Arden Syntax

Implementing the clinical guidelines is intended to improve safety, quality, andcost-effectiveness. The importance of clinical guidelines has already been widelyrecognized. However, most current clinical guidelines are based on the static text,which is very inconvenient to refer to and difficult to implement strictly in clinicalpractice; and because the clinicians can not master so many different clinicalguidelines of special diseases, they are often not concerned about other specialdiseases, which cumbers the early diagnosis and disease prevention.Comparing with the clinical guidelines which are based on the static text, thedigital clinical guidelines could: 1). combine with the medical records, automaticallyprovide clinical suggestion or recommendation in the clinical practice according tothe clinical guidelines, and realize the standard diagnosis and treatment without theneed of referring to the clinical guidelines; 2). have a comprehensive judgment ofpatient's physiological indicators according to various diseases' clinical guidelines,detect the non-special diseases and provide the intelligent reminders to clinicians,which is beneficial to early diagnosis and disease prevention. However, as digitizedclinical guidelines are encoded with engineering language, and as there are essentialdifferences between the engineering language and the clinical language, it is difficultfor clinicians to master the digitized clinical guidelines. Hence the digitization ofclinical guidelines can be achieved only through the repeated communicationbetween the clinicians and the engineers. This mode makes it very slow to digitizethe clinical guidelines, and even end up with serious errors. Therefore, in order tosolve the problem in understanding the digitized clinical guidelines, to improve thequality of the clinical guidelines, and to accelerate the work of digitizing the clinicalguidelines, we exact a tool which could let the clinicians directly participate in theclinical guide digitization work.This dissertation uses Arden Syntax, a representation model of clinicalguidelines, to encode the clinical guidelines in medical logic module (MLM) first,and then visualize the clinical guidelines with Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Thismethod can establish a tool which could let the clinicians directly participate in theclinical guide digitization work. Therefore, the clinicians only need to pay attentionto check whether the visualized clinical practice guidelines satisfy the requirement,and modify them on this basis to form standardized digital clinical guidelines. In future, the clinicians could use this tool to map the clinical guidelines directly todigitize the clinical guidelines. Thus it could effectively solve the problem indigitizing clinical guidelines.The work of this dissertation includes:Analyze the characteristics of the various clinical guidelines representationmodel, and then choose one of them as a knowledge representation of clinicalguidelines;Analyze the characteristics of the logic visualization methods, then select theflowchart as clinical guidelines visualization method, design the criterion of flowchart with consideration of the characteristics of clinical practice guidelines;On the basis of confirming the visualization objects and visualization method,this dissertation designs the visualization program structure, and designsvisualization intermediate language and visualization tools with the needs ofprogram structure;Select the diabetes clinical guidelines to visualize, and also visualize the clinicalguidelines of tetanus prevention, which could confirm the feasibility of thisprogram.