We propose a method which visualizes irregular multidimensional time-series data as a sequence of probabilistic prototypes for detecting exceptions from medical test data. Conventional visualization methods often require iterative analysis and considerable skill thus are not totally supported by a wide range of medical experts. Our PrototypeLines displays summarized information based on a probabilistic mixture model by using hue only thus is considered to exhibit novelty. The effectiveness of the summarization is pursued mainly through use of a novel information criterion. We report our endeavor with chronic hepatitis data, especially discoveries of interesting exceptions by a nonexpert and an untrained expert.

The hepatitis temporal database collected at Chiba university hospital between 1982--2001 was recently given to challenge the KDD research. The database is large where each patient corresponds to 983 tests represented as sequences of irregular timestamp points with different lengths. This paper presents a temporal abstraction approach to mining knowledge from this hepatitis database. Exploiting hepatitis background knowledge and data analysis, we introduce new notions and methods for abstracting short-term changed and long-term changed tests. The abstracted data allow us to apply different machine learning methods for finding knowledge part of which is considered as new and interesting by medical doctors.