Alan, My guess (and some based from my own experience), is that it supports the way a lot of non-technical clinicians like to organize the process: 1) what I want, 2) what I must avoid.
I beleive you are right that exlcusion is simply an explicit set of OR-ed negations. An interesting thing to find out would be whether there are any exclusions forms that are AND-ed negations-- in which a simple list of exclusion criteria would be insufficient. Eric -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Alan Ruttenberg Sent: Tue 9/11/2007 12:53 PM To: Vipul Kashyap Cc: Andersson, Bo H; Landen Bain; Rachel Richesson; public-semweb-lifesci hcls; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Stanley Huff; Yan Heras; Oniki, Tom (GE Healthcare, consultant); Joey Coyle; Bron W. Kisler; Ida Sim Subject: [BIONT-DSE] Inclusion versus exclusion criteria Something that I remain confused about is why there are two categories of criteria, when, on the face of it, the negation of an exclusion criterion is an inclusion criterion. So I'm wondering, is there something between the lines? Is there something other than the negation? Perhaps kind of criteria, or lesser necessity, or derivation from different sources? Open versus closed world? Otherwise, from a technical point of view can we just consider these the the same sort of thing, with a flag indicating how they should be shown in a hypothetical user interface? -Alan