Shahar Y, Combi C
Section on Medical Informatics, School of Medicine, Stanford University, CA 94305-5479, USA.
West J Med. 1998 Feb;168(2):105-13.
Time is important in clinical information systems. Representing, maintaining, querying, and reasoning about time-oriented clinical data is a major theoretical and practical research area in medical informatics. In this nonexhaustive overview, we present a brief synopsis of research efforts in designing and developing time-oriented information systems in medicine. These efforts can be viewed from either an application point of view, distinguishing between different clinical tasks (such as diagnosis versus therapy) and clinical areas (such as infectious diseases versus oncology), or a methodological point of view, distinguishing between different theoretical approaches. We also explore the two primary methodological and theoretical paths research has taken in the past decade: temporal reasoning and temporal data maintenance. Both of these research areas include efforts to model time, temporal entities, and temporal queries. Collaboration between the two areas is possible, through tasks such as the abstraction of raw time-oriented clinical data into higher-level meaningful clinical concepts and the management of different levels of temporal granularity. Such collaboration could provide a common ground and useful areas for future research and development. We conclude with our view of future research directions.
时间在临床信息系统中至关重要。对面向时间的临床数据进行表示、维护、查询和推理是医学信息学中一个主要的理论和实践研究领域。在这篇非详尽的综述中，我们简要概述了在医学领域设计和开发面向时间的信息系统方面的研究工作。这些工作可以从应用角度来看待，区分不同的临床任务（如诊断与治疗）和临床领域（如传染病与肿瘤学），也可以从方法论角度来看待，区分不同的理论方法。我们还探讨了过去十年研究中所采用的两条主要的方法论和理论路径：时间推理和时间数据维护。这两个研究领域都包括对时间、时间实体和时间查询进行建模的工作。通过诸如将原始的面向时间的临床数据抽象为更高级别的有意义的临床概念以及管理不同级别的时间粒度等任务，这两个领域之间的合作是可能的。这种合作可以为未来的研发提供一个共同基础和有用的领域。我们以对未来研究方向的看法作为结论。
