Medical guidelines reconciling medical software and electronic devices: Imatinib case-study

Abstract

Nowadays medical software is tightly coupled with medical devices that perform patient state monitoring and lately even some basic treatment procedures. Medical guidelines (GLs) can be seen as specification of a medical system that includes both software and electronic devices. However, often medical GLs suffer from structural problems, such as incompleteness, inconsistencies, ambiguity and redundancy. Formal representation of GLs would enable the validation of GLs structural, real-time and life-cycle properties. Several GLs formal representation methods have been presented recently. Only some of them enable automatic formal verification by introducing an additional translation path to the existing model checking environments. However, if a verified property fails it is difficult to trace back the result needed to change the model. Moreover, these formalisms provide the notion of time mostly in terms of actions order. In this paper we preset a novel approach based on Timed Automata extended with Tasks (TAT) for the medical protocol formal representation using the TIMES toolbox. We discuss the verification issues with the help of the Imatinib case study.