Visualization of Clinical Protocols

We developed a time-oriented, skeletal plan-representation language called Asbru [1] used to represent clinical protocols. It is a modeling language which supports both the design and the execution of skeletal plans by a human executing agent other than the original plan designer. During the design phase, Asbru allows to express durative actions and plans caused by durative states of an observed agent. During the execution phase, Asbru allows flexibility to instantiate the skeletal plans with time-oriented patient data. Thus Asbru is a complex language and is hard to understand if the user has no training in formal methods or computer science. To solve this problem we developed a visual interface called AsbruView [2]. Based on visual metaphors like traffic signs and running tracks, AsbruView provides editing and visualizing. The three different views implemented, the Topological View (Fig. 1), the Temporal View, and the SOPO View (Set of Possible Occurances) are powerful tools to analyze and edit structural and temporal dependences of clinical protocols.