The concepts managed in Terap-IA are those related to the pharmacological knowledge about pneumonia treatments and those representing the clinical condition of the patient. The goal of the system is to find the best combination of antibiotics to treat a patient with pneumonia. During the treatment generation process we ``weigh'' concepts, for instance, the antibiotic adequacy, to give a ranking of final results hence, the clinician can decide to choose an option in the ranking taking into account his preferences.
Pharmacological knowledge Antibiotics are pharmacological products for infections' treatment. Antibiotics belong to different pharmacological groups, sharing different properties. For instance, all antibiotics of the same group have a similar spectrum of activity, that is, the set of microorganisms covered by the antibiotics is similar. On the other hand, antibiotics belonging to the same group have different particular characteristics such as cost, administration route, interaction with other drugs, and so on. For instance, amoxicillin and procaine-penicillin G belong to the group penicillins and they cover gram-positive bacteries, but amoxicillin is orally administrated and procaine-penicillin G is intramuscularly administrated.
We consider an antibiotic treatment for a microorganism as a set
of antibiotics, normally one and, occasionally two. An
antibiotic combination is the result of covering more than one
microorganism. It is a set of one
, two, or exceptionally three antibiotics.
The system represents knowledge about all these aspects of antibiotics.
Patient data From the pharmacological knowledge explained above
and the particular data of a patient, the system is able to deduce the
best treatment for that patient. The most important patient data is
the diagnosis consisting of a list of the microorganisms
possibly causing the pneumonia (normally upmost three microorganisms).
Other relevant data of the patient is relative to clinical history, physical examination, laboratory test and chest radiograph data, renal function, severity of illness, allergic reactions, genetics alterations and so on.
For instance, we have to take into account the intake of other drugs by the patient to avoid undesired interactions among them. Another example is that the administration of antibiotics before the onset of pneumonia can produce that the microorganism producing pneumonia develops resistance to some antibiotics.