Critiquing: Effective Decision Support In Time-Critical Domains

Critiquing Effective Decision Support in Time Critical Domains Abigail S Gertner Bonnie L Webber Supervisor The TraumAID system is a tool for assisting physicians during the initial de nitive management phase of patients with severe injuries Originally TraumAID was conceived as a rule based expert system combined with a planner After this architecture had been implemented and evaluated we began to face the issue of how TraumAID could commu nicate its plans to physicians in order to in uence their behavior and have a positive e ect on patient outcome It was hypothesized that a critiquing approach in which the system is told what actions the user intends to carry out and produces a critique in response to those intentions might be appropriate To meet the needs of physicians engaged in managing trauma cases critiques must be updated and made available rapidly They must be clear and succinct containing only relevant information while still including enough justi cation to make them convincing To address the need for these features in the system I have developed a critiquing architecture consisting of three components incremental plan recognition plan evaluation and critique generation I have implemented this architecture in TraumaTIQ a critiquing interface for the TraumAID system Comparison of TraumaTIQ s comments on actual management plans with comments made by three local trauma experts showed that TraumaTIQ pro duced of comments made by only one judge and of comments made by two