Temporal Data Management and Knowledge Acquisition Issues in Medical Decision Support Systems

The development of data-intensive systems in medical domains has received increasing attention in recent years. In this work we present in depth some parts of ACUDES (Architecture for Intensive Care Units Decision Support) in which traditional techniques for managing and representing time have been integrated with a temporal diagnosis task in a decision support platform. ACUDES has been designed to manage the information regarding patient evolution and to describe the patients evolution in terms of the temporal sequence diseases suffered. These functionalities are supported by an ontology which simplifies the knowledge acquisition and sharing, while guaranteeing the semantic consistency of patients’ evolution data. This work will be focused on the Temporal Data Management and the Knowledge Acquisition Tool.