| Quality checking of medical guidelines through logical abduction (2003) | |||||||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||||||
| Formal methods have been used in the past for the verication of the correctness of formalised versions of medical guidelines. In this paper a second possible application of the use of formal methods is proposed: checking whether a guideline conforms to global medical quality requirements. It is argued that this allows spotting design errors in medical guidelines, which is seen as a useful application for formal methods in medicine. However, this type of verication may require medical knowledge currently not available within the guidelines, i.e. medical background knowledge. In this paper, we propose a method for checking the quality of a treatment for a disorder, based on the theory of abductive diagnosis. We also examine the medical background knowledge required to be able to quality check a guideline. The method is illustrated by the formal analysis of an actual guideline for the management of diabetes mellitus type 2. 1 | |||||||||||||||||
Publication details | |||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||