Achieving semantic integration of medical knowledge for clinical decision support systems

Abstract

Enhancing the outputs of the Clinical Decision Support systems (CDS) is a permanent concern for many research communities, which have to deal with an abundance of entities, data, structures, methods, application, tools, and so on. In the few past decades, there were theorized and standardized technologies that could help researchers to obtain better results. The paper presents a method to enrich the inputs of the CDS through a semantic integration of several medical knowledge sources, by using the Topic Maps standard, in order to obtain more refined medical recommendations. Future research directions and challenges are summarized and conclusions are issued. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.