Visualizing and interactive modelling of process hierarchies

This study deals with the visualization and modeling of protocol-based treatment plans that are composed from hierarchically structured skeletal-plans, and defined in the Asbru language. For this it introduces PlanStrips, a tree-map based visualization, designed for ease of use and simplicity. To test the PlanStrips visualization a prototype of the same name was developed. PlanStrips main characteristics are a dense presentation of treatment plans and qualitative presentation of plan execution order. The prototype also displays other guideline features such as conditions. After an introduction and short description of the projects background, the thesis takes a look at well-known visualization approaches for hierarchically structured data, as well as existing tools for Asbru guideline visualization and editing. In a discussion aspects/features of these tools are juxtaposed with PlanStrips. A user study was conducted to evaluate the PlanStrips prototype and verify its claims of simplicity and easy of use. The evaluation included three physicians, two domain experts, and a software engineer. The participants' knowledge in the fields of medical guidelines, guideline definition languages and general computer knowledge varied from novice to expert level. The results of the evaluation are presented and discussed. Both a qualitative and, to a lesser degree, quantitative evaluation of the findings are given.