Discriminating Exanthematic Diseases from Temporal Patterns of Patient Symptoms

The temporal dimension is a characterizing factor of many diseases, in particular, of the exanthematic diseases. Therefore, the diagnosis of this kind of diseases can be based on the recognition of the typical temporal progression and duration of different symptoms. To this aim, we propose to apply a temporal reasoning system we have developed. The system is able to handle both qualitative and metric temporal knowledge affected by vagueness and uncertainty. In this preliminary work, we show how the fuzzy temporal framework allows us to represent typical temporal structures of different exanthematic diseases (e.g. Scarlet Fever, Measles, Rubella et c.) thus making possible to find matches with data coming from the patient disease.