Temporal Clinical Databases

This chapter introduces the reader to some important issues and topics of temporal clinical databases. More specifically the chapter focuses on modeling and querying issues related to the management of temporal clinical data collected into medical records. The reader, then, learns how some temporal relational and object-oriented models have been suitably defined to deal with the specific temporal aspects of clinical data. The presentation then focuses on some main data models explicitly proposed for managing clinical data with multiple temporal dimensions and with clinical temporal data given at different and mixed granularities/indeterminacies. The reader learns how to design and query a temporal clinical database both by the temporal relational model and by temporal object-oriented data models with the related query languages, respectively. Finally, the reader is guided through some specific aspects of a real temporal clinical database system allowing the management of follow-up patients who underwent cardiac angioplasty.