A Common Ontology Based Approach for Clinical Practice Guidelines Using OWL-Ontologies

Abstract

The production and dissemination of clinical practice guidelines (CPG) is usually reliant upon the opinions and interventions of the physicians’ knowledge that are presented in the form of text narratives. The knowledge utilized during the production of CPGs, is largely technical and procedural knowledge. However, the cognitive challenge encountered by the physician is to internalize this new guideline knowledge routinely into actions and clinical decisions. Ontologies have often been used to formalize and represent clinical guidelines. In this study, we propose an approach to the acquisition of CPG knowledge into computer-interpretable form to develop a semantically rich common ontology. To establish a comprehensive representation of CPGs we analyzed abstracts taken from the sub-domains of HeartDiseases related to its diagnosis, possible treatments, and interventions and structured them using the protégé-OWL formal modeling tool. The completeness, and expressiveness of the ontology are then validated using structured and unstructured queries.