Design of an Ontology-Based Triage System for Patients with Chronic Pain

Abstract

Objective: Waiting time for a consultation for chronic pain is a widespread health problem. This paper presents the design of an ontology use to assess patients referred to a consultation for chronic pain. Methods: We designed OntoDol, an ontology of pain domain for patient triage based on priority degrees. Terms were extracted from clinical practice guidelines and mapped to SNOMED-CT concepts through the Python module Owlready2. Selected SNOMED-CT concepts, relationships, and the TIME ontology, were implemented in the ontology using Protégé. Decision rules were implemented with SWRL. We evaluated OntoDol on 5 virtual cases. Results: OntoDol contains 762 classes, 92 object properties and 18 SWRL rules to assign patients to 4 categories of priority. OntoDol was able to assert every case and classify them in the right category of priority. Conclusion: Further works will extend OntoDol to other diseases and assess OntoDol with real world data from the hospital.