F Steimann, M Hayde Methods of Information in Medicine 36:1 (1997) 51-58
Abstract: Among the diagnostic problems requiring a retrospective assessment of the time an event occurred is that of screening for primary infection with Toxoplasma gondii acquired during pregnancy. We suggest a method to derive the possible times of onset of infection from a small sequence of serological samples by matching them against the knowledge about possible courses of infection. Special care is taken to properly address the relative change of consecutive samples, a nontrivial problem when reasoning about sparsely sampled time courses. To investigate the practicability of our approach we conducted a retrospective and a simulated prospective evaluation based on the samples of 394 pregnancies randomly selected from our toxoplasmosis database; we could demonstrate an overall accuracy of 95.7%.
Keywords: temporal reasoning, serodiagnosis, reasoning about relative change, onset of infection, Toxoplasma gondii