Abstraction Of Time-Oriented Clinical Data

The chapter aims to give a comprehensive and critical review of current approaches to the common task of abstraction of time-oriented data in medicine, or temporal abstraction. Temporal-data abstraction constitutes a central requirement that presently receives much and justifiable attention. The role of this process is especially crucial in the context of time-oriented clinical monitoring, therapy planning, and exploration of clinical databases. General theories of time typically used in artificial intelligence do not fully address the requirements for temporal abstraction in medical reasoning (see Chapter 2).