A temporal analysis of QMR: abstracted temporal representation and reasoning and initial assessment of diagnostic...

Explicit temporal representation and reasoning (TRR) in medical decision-support systems (MDSS) is generally considered to be a useful but often neglected aspect of system design and implementation. Given the great burden of explicit TRR both in knowledge acquisition and computational efficiency, developers of general-purpose large-scale systems typically utilize implicit (i.e., abstracted) forms of TRR. We are interested in understanding better the trade-offs of not incorporating explicit TRR in large general-purpose MDSS along the dimensions of system expressive power and diagnostic accuracy. In particular, we examine the types of abstracted TRR employed in QMR, a diagnostic system in the domain of general internal medicine, and the high-level effects of such an implicit treatment of time in the system's diagnostic performance. We present our findings and discuss implications for MDSS design and implementation practices.