A Fuzzy Approach to Temporal Model-Based Diagnosis for Intensive Care Units

In the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) domain, temporal evolution of diseases and patients’ contextual information are critical pieces of knowledge that must be considered in the design of a diagnosis task. The uncertainty inherent in the description of temporal information associated to diseases requires a temporal representation and reasoning framework. This temporal framework has to be flexible enough to facilitate its integration in a behavioral model. This paper proposes a Temporal Behavioral Model (TBM) that makes this integration possible and permits the specification of contextual information (that may modify the TBM). A diagnosis process is also proposed. This process uses temporal model based techniques and Fuzzy Temporal Constraints Networks (FTCN) as the underlying temporal framework. Some heuristics, which affect not only the temporal reasoning dimension but also the causal, have been designed in order to compute solutions efficiently.