Clinical Practice Guideline Formalization: Translating Clinical Practice Guidelines to Computer Interpretable Guidelines

• Author / Creator

  Gad El-Rab, Wessam

• Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) offer concise instruction on the optimal care for the patient based on the latest clinical findings. The main benefit of a CPG is to improve the quality of care, and the consistency of care. It is been shown that passive dissemination of CPGs, like publishing in a medical journal, is ineffective in changing practice behavior. Nevertheless, integrating CPG knowledge into clinical systems, such as decision support systems, has shown to be more effective. In order to best benefit from the knowledge in the CPGs, an interest in automatically formalizing medical knowledge contained in CPGs has grown. This dissertation describes a new framework to automate a subset of the common CPGs formalization research problems. Our framework follows a multi-step approach, which has been shown to be a good strategy for CPG formalization. One of the major sub-problem to automate the formalization of CPGs is to detect ambiguity in CPGs and resolve it automatically. In this dissertation we described two unsupervised algorithms to the resolve ambiguities in CPGs.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Clinical Practice Guideline Formalization

• Graduation date

  Spring 2016

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3PR7N26Z

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.