Identifying Patterns in Clinical Guidelines

This master’s thesis is embedded in the Asgaard Project, which concentrates
on developing methods and programs for authoring, verifying and executing
clinical protocols. The goal of this thesis was to identify relevant pattern in
clinical guidelines.
First of all, it was necessary to detect guidelines which were suitable for the
further work. For this reason, miscellaneous medical and technical criteria
had to be defined, which the guidelines had to meet. After the selection of
10 guidelines, it was possible to start with the major task – the analysis. For
the detection of recurring pattern the domain of text linguistics was taken.
These detected pattern were classified and specified in detail. Afterwards,
one group of these detected pattern was chosen, which was suitable for the
implementation in Asbru. These chosen pattern were implemented in Asbru
and macros for the Guideline Markup Tool (GMT) were developed
subsequently.
The major objective of this thesis was to provide a detailed analysis of the
process which leads to the generation of pattern in clinical guidelines.
Beginning with the selection of the guidelines, the identification of pattern,
the implementation of pattern in Asbru until the generation of macros in
GMT – all necessary steps of the development of pattern were completely
specified and explained within this thesis.