Temporal reasoning abstractions in QMR

A medical decision-support system (MDSS) employs either explicit or implicit temporal representation and reasoning (TRR). In this paper we first examine the factors that make explicit TRR necessary. We argue that for diagnostic MDSSs in large domains, such as internal medicine, implicit TRR is often sufficient for acceptable diagnostic performance. A necessary prerequisite for implementing implicit TRR is the identification of a set of proper TRR abstractions. We analyze the implicit TRR utilized in QMR, a MDSS operating in the domain of general internal medicine, and describe three classes of TRR abstractions. We discuss our findings in relation to work on temporal reasoning in medical informatics.