TY - GEN
T1 - Towards an implicit treatment of periodically-repeated medical data
AU - Stantic, Bela
AU - Terenziani, Paolo
AU - Sattar, Abdul
AU - Bottrighi, Alessio
AU - Governatori, Guido
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - Temporal information plays a crucial role in medicine, so that in Medical Informatics there is an increasing awareness that suitable database approaches are needed to store and support it. Specifically, a great amount of clinical data (e.g., therapeutic data) are periodically repeated. Although an explicit treatment is possible in most cases, it causes severe storage and disk I/O problems. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach to cope with periodic medical data in an implicit way. We propose a new data model, representing periodic data in a compact (implicit) way, which is a consistent extension of TSQL2 consensus approach. Then, we identify some important types of temporal queries, and present query answering algorithms to answer them. We also sketch a temporal relational algebra for our approach. Finally, we show experimentally that our approach outperforms current explicit approaches.
AB - Temporal information plays a crucial role in medicine, so that in Medical Informatics there is an increasing awareness that suitable database approaches are needed to store and support it. Specifically, a great amount of clinical data (e.g., therapeutic data) are periodically repeated. Although an explicit treatment is possible in most cases, it causes severe storage and disk I/O problems. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach to cope with periodic medical data in an implicit way. We propose a new data model, representing periodic data in a compact (implicit) way, which is a consistent extension of TSQL2 consensus approach. Then, we identify some important types of temporal queries, and present query answering algorithms to answer them. We also sketch a temporal relational algebra for our approach. Finally, we show experimentally that our approach outperforms current explicit approaches.
KW - Databases
KW - Periodic data
KW - Temporal information
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=78649501047&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3233/978-1-60750-588-4-1131
DO - 10.3233/978-1-60750-588-4-1131
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:78649501047
SN - 9781607505877
T3 - Studies in Health Technology and Informatics
SP - 1131
EP - 1135
BT - Medinfo 2010 - Proceedings of the 13th World Congress on Medical Informatics
PB - IOS Press
T2 - 13th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics, Medinfo 2010
Y2 - 12 September 2010 through 15 September 2010
ER -