Developing cardiac electrophysiology ontology: Moving towards data harmonization and integration

Abstract

Introduction: Cardiac electrophysiology (EP) studies the electrical heart conduction system which is used for diagnosis and treatment of cardiac arrhythmias. In this context, a huge amount of data is generated, requiring efficient and effective access, interpretation, and data analysis from multiple sources in a unified view. To resolve this challenge, this paper presents an ontology to reconcile data heterogeneity problems in this domain. Material and Methods: The cardiac EP ontology was constructed according to the life cycle of ontology building. Structural, functional, and expert evaluation was performed to ensure its quality and usability. Results: Cardiac EP ontology was developed using protégé environment and implemented in OWL editing tool. It presented a detailed hierarchical structure of the cardiac EP domain with around 324 instances describing cardiac EP-related concepts. Conclusion: Cardiac EP ontology provides an explicit formal description of the concepts, relationships, and properties associated with cardiac electrophysiology making seamless data integration between multiple heterogeneous databases. It also is a useful framework for knowledge representation in knowledge-based systems, as well as for explicit communication between experts in the EP domain.