A conceptual representation of clinical and managerial guidelines: the ATREUS workflow model.

In this paper we propose a workflow conceptual model able to represent clinical and managerial activities within healthcare structures, the ATREUS model. This model uses: a) a graphical representation which models the activities and the events that activate them; b) a textual representation of information related to: a set of conditions used for the control of activity execution; the actors who undertake the activity; the resources and tools necessary for its enactment, the clinical and managerial data generated by the activity execution; c) a state diagram which allows the control of the activity execution. The model allows modularity, activity nesting and temporal flexibility using a top-down refinement of processes.

A second generation of terminological systems is coming.

Diverse achievements by recent computer-based terminological systems are outlining a new generation of systems (i.e. a "second generation").

A cooperative methodology to build conceptual models in medicine.

We designed a methodology to perform distribute activities on conceptual modelling among cooperating centers. Our methodology assigns responsibilities and tasks and regulates interactions preserving coherence; it passes through the construction of unambiguous paraphrases to make explicit the context within the original sources, and through their compositional representation in an intermediate language. The process is intrinsically iterative, with continuous feedbacks and refinements, alternating analytic view on details and synthetic view on regularities and structures.

Browsing and querying multimedia report collections.

In this paper a system and new methodologies that enable efficient exploration of distributed collections of multimedia reports are described. A conceptual model for the report and a method to semi-automatically create a hypermedia report network have been defined. The main issues addressed in this project were to exploit the textual component of a report to give a more evident semantic meaning to the data produced during the relative exam and to provide users with new interaction paradigms based on Internet technologies.

SMART: a system supporting medical activities in real-time.

This paper describes the system SMART whose goal is real-time assistance to physicians who execute diagnostic or therapeutic protocols in a clinical context. SMART is able to retrieve a protocol from its knowledge base and to monitor its execution step by step for a single patient. Different protocols for different patients can be followed at the same time in a health care structure.