Modeling of Medical Treatment Processes for an Interactive Assistance Based on the Translation of UML Activities into PROforma

In modern medicine, Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) are well-established resources for the appropriate treatment of diseases. Evidence-based CPGs contain recommendations which are based on the state of the art and which have been achieved by consensus of several experts. Nevertheless, there is a potential for problems in translating guideline documents into specific actions for physicians. Therefore we propose to formalize the treatment process in an understandable representation as UML activities together with a domain expert. This formalization serves as a basis for the transfer of knowledge into a model, in this case PROforma, which directly allows execution in an interactive assistance software. The results of this work are part of an ongoing research project on the treatment of colon cancer based on the corresponding evidence-based CPG.