The Interpretation And Execution Of Clinical Practice Guidelines Using Answer Set Prolog

Clinical practice guidelines(CPGs), are defined as systematically developed statesments to assist physician and patient in making decisions about appropriate health care for specific circumstances. CPGs aim to improve the quality of care, limit unjustified practice variations and reduce healthcare costs. However, these paper-based guidelines are particularly difficult to be applied into real environment. How to realize the automatical execution of guidelines has become a research focus of clinical decision support. Computer-interpretable guideline modeling language is the key point in these researches. Intuitive semantics will facilitate the users to model CPGs in the language, and elaboration tolerance is required to faciliate the update of the models. This paper uses Answer set prolog(ASP) to represent, explain, and implement the execution of CPGs based on a medical model SDA*.The main researches of this paper include:1) the precise definition of the medical model SDA*, which is the basis of modeling CPGs; 2) the semantics of SDA* for the interactive procedure between patients and physicians under a specific circumstance.3) the implementation of the above interactive execution using ASP. First, formalize SDA* model in ASP, and then design an ASP algorithm according to the interactive semantic, which implements the execution via finding answer sets of the ASP program.4) ASP based method to spot and analysis the compliance with SDA* model. This method can check the non-complicane between proposed actions taken by medical doctors and the recommendations prescribed by guidelines, and give related warnings and explainations.5) Designing and implementing an ASP based system to support automatical execution of CPGs.The main contributions of this paper include:1) Giving a precise definition of SDA’ based on graph theory; 2) Presenting a definition of interaction execution based on SDA*.3) Proposing an ASP based method to support interactive execution of CPGs.4) Proposing an ASP based method to spot and analysis the compliance with SDA* model.