The VeriCliG Project: Extraction of Computer Interpretable Guidelines via Syntactic and Semantic Annotation

We consider the problem of extracting formal process representations of the therapies defined by clinical guidelines, viz., computer interpretable guidelines (CIGs), based on UMLS and semantic and syntactic annotation. CIGs enable the application of formal methods (such as model checking, verification, conformance assessment) to the clinical domain. We argue that, while minimally structured, correspondences among clinical guideline syntax and discourse relations and clinical process constructs should however be exploited to successfully extract CIGs. We review work on current clinical syntactic and semantic annotation, pinpointing their limitations, and discuss a CIG extraction methodology based on recent efforts on business process modelling notation (BPMN) model extraction from natural language text.