Abstract
Automated medical diagnosis systems based on knowledge-oriented descriptions have gained momentum with the emergence of semantic descriptions. The objective of this paper is to propose a normalized design that solves some of the problems which have been detected by authors in previous tools. The authors bring together two different technologies to develop a new clinical decision support system: description logics aimed at developing inference systems to improve decision support for the prevention, treatment and management of illness and semantic technologies. Because of its new design, the system is capable of obtaining improved diagnostics compared with previous efforts. However, this evaluation is more focused in the computational performance, giving as result that description logics is a good solution with small data sets. In this paper, we provide a well-structured ontology for automated diagnosis in the medical field and a three-fold formalization based on Description Logics with the use of Semantic Web technologies.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
O’Sullivan, D., and Dooley, L., Collaborative innovation for the management of information technology resources. Int. J. Hum. Cap. Inf. Technol. Professionals. 1(1):16–30, 2010.
Ammenwerth, E., Schnell-Inderst, P., Machan, C., and Siebert, U., The effect of electronic prescribing on medication errors and adverse drug events: A systematic review. J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 15(5):585–600, 2008.
Amit, X. G., Neill, K. J. A., Heather, M. M., Rosas-Arellano, P., Devereaux, P. J., Beyene, J., Sam, J., and Haynes, R. B., Effects of Computerized Clinical Decision Support Systems on Practitioner Performance and Patient Outcomes: A Systematic Review. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 293(10):1223–1238, 2005.
García-Crespo, A., Rodríguez-González, A., Colomo-Palacios, R., Labra-Gayo, J. E., Gómez-Berbís, J. M., and Alor-Hernández, G., Automated Diagnosis though Ontologies and Logical Descriptions: the ADONIS approach. International Journal of Decision Support System Technology (IJDSST). 3(1):21–39, 2011.
Wright, A., and Sittig, D. F., A four-phase model of the evolution of clinical decision support architectures. Int. J. Med. Inform. 77(10):641–649, 2008.
Sim, I., Gorman, P., Greenes, R., Haynes, R., Kaplan, B., Lehmann, H., and Tang, P. C., Clinical decision support systems for the practice of evidence based medicine. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 8(6):527–534, 2001.
Kawamoto, K., Houlihan, C. A., Balas, E. A., and Lobach, D. F., Improving clinical practice using clinical decision support systems: A systematic review of trials to identify features critical to success. Br. Med. J. 330:765–768, 2005.
Osheroff, J. A., Teich, J. M., Middleton, B., Steen, E. B., Wright, A., and Detmer, D. E., A roadmap for National action on clinical decision support. J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 14(2):141–145, 2007.
Sittig, D. F., Wright, A., Osheroff, J. A., Middleton, B., Teich, J. M., Ash, J. S., Campbell, E., and Bates, D. W., Grand challenges in clinical decision support. J. Biomed. Inform. 41(2):387–392, 2008.
Kuperman, G. J., Bobb, A., Payne, T. H., Avery, A. J., Gandhi, T. K., Burns, G., Classen, D. C., and Bates, D. W., Medication-related clinical decision support in computerized provider order entry systems: A review. J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 14(1):29–40, 2007.
Shortliffe, E. H., Computer-based medical consultations: MYCIN: Elsevier Publishing, New York, NY, 1976
Suwa, M., Scott, A. C., and Shortliffe, E. H., An approach to verifying completeness and consistency in a rule-based expert system. AI Mag. 3(4):16–21, 1982.
Gutiérrez-Estrada, J. C., De-Pedro, S. E., López-Luque, R., Pulido-Calvo, I., SEDPA, an expert system for disease diagnosis in eel rearing systems. Aquac. Eng. 33(2):110–125, 2005.
Broverman, C. A., Standards for clinical decision support systems. J. Healthc. Inf. Manag. 13(2):23–31, 1999.
Berlin, A., Sorani, M., and Sim, I., A taxonomic description of computer-based clinical decision support systems. J. Biomed. Inform. 39(6):656–667, 2006.
Mangiameli, P., West, D., and Rampal, R., Model selection for medical diagnosis decision support systems. Decis. Support. Syst. 36(3):247–259, 2004.
Miller, R. A., Medical diagnostic decision support systems – past, present, and future: a threaded bibliography and brief commentary. J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 1(1):8–27, 1994.
Sheng, O. R. L., Editorial: Decision support for healthcare in a new information age. Decis. Support. Syst. 30(2):101–103, 2004.
Liao, S. H., Expert System methodologies and applications – a decade review from 1995 to 2004. Expert syst. Appl. 28(1):93–103, 2005.
Übeyli, E. D., Implementing automated diagnostic systems for breast cancer detection. Expert Syst. Appl. 33(4):1054–1062, 2007.
Benjamins, V. R., Davies, J., Baeza-Yates, R., Mika, P., Zaragoza, H., Gómez-Pérez, J. M., Contreras, J., Domingue, J., and Fensel, D., Near-term pros-pects for semantic technologies. IEEE Intell. Syst. 23(1):76–88, 2008.
Vossen, G., Lytras, M., and Koudas, N., Editorial: Revisiting the (Machine) Semantic Web: The missing layers for the human Semantic Web. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 19(2):145–148, 2007.
Fensel, D., and Munsen, M. A., The Semantic Web: A Brain for Humankind. IEEE Intell. Syst. 16(2):24–25, 2001.
Lytras, M. D., and García, R., Semantic Web applications: a framework for industry and business exploitation - What is needed for the adoption of the Semantic Web from the market and industry. Int. J. Knowl. Learn. 4(1):93–108, 2008.
Gurupur, B. P., and Tanik, M. M., A system for building clinical research applications using Semantic Web-based approach. J. Med. Syst. 2010. doi:10.1007/s10916-010-9445-8
García-Sánchez, F., Fernández-Breis, J. T., Valencia-García, R., Gómez, J. M., and Martínez-Béjar, R., Combining Semantic Web Technologies with multi-agent systems for integrated access to biological resources. J. Biomed. Inform. 41(5):848–859, 2008.
Jalali, V., and Borujerdi, R. M. M., A unified architecture for biomedical search engines based on semantic Web Technologies. J. Med. Syst. 35(2):237–249, 2011.
Fensel, D., Ontologies: A silver bullet for knowledge management and electronic commerce. Springer, Berlin, 2002.
Fuentes-Lorenzo, D., Morato, J., and Gómez-Berbís, J. M., Knowledge management in biomedical libraries: A semantic web approach. Inf. Syst. Front. 11(4):471–480, 2009.
Sicilia, J. J., Sicilia, M. A., Sánchez-Alonso, S., García-Barriocanal, E., and Pontikaki, M., Knowledge representation issues in ontology-based clinical knowledge management systems. Int. J. Technol. Manage. 47(1–3):191–206, 2009.
Schulz, S., Stenzhorn, H., Boeker, M., and Smith, B., Strengths and limitations of formal ontologies in the biomedical domain. Electron. J. Commun. Inf. Innov. Heath. 3(1):31–45, 2009.
Stenzhorn, H., Schulz, S., Boeker, M., and Smith, B., Adapting clinical ontologies in real-world environments. J. Univ. Comput. Sci. 14(22):3767–3780, 2008.
Graber, M., Diagnostic errors in medicine: A case of neglect. Joint Comm. J. Qual. Patient Saf. 31(2):106–113, 2005.
Rector, A. L., Rogers, J. E., Zanstra, P. E., and Van der Haring, E., OpenGALEN: Open source medical terminology and tools. Proceedings of AMIA Symposium. 2003.
Baader, F., Horrocks, I., and Sattler, U., Description Logics as Ontology Languages for the Semantic Web. In Mechanizing Mathematical Reasoning. SpringerLink. 2003.
Sirin, E., Parsia, B., Cuenca-Grau, B., Kalyanpur, A., Katz, Y., Pellet: A practical OWL-DL reasoner. Web. Semant. Sci. Serv. Agents World Wide. Web. 5(2);51–53, 2007.
Gómez-Pérez, J. M., and Ruiz, C., Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web. Stud. Comput. Intell. 311(2010):191–224, 2010.
Kiryakov, A., Ognyanov, D., and Manov, D., OWLIM – a Pragmatic Semantic Repository for OWL. Int. Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems (SSWS 2005). 182–192, 2005.
Bishop, B., Kiryakov, A., Ognyanoff, D., Peikov, I., Tashev, Z., and Velkov, R., OWLIM: A family of scalable semantic repositories. Semantic Web. 0:1–10, 2011.
Tsarkov, D., and Horrocks, I., FaCT++ Description Logic Reasoner: System Description. In Automated Reasoning Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 4130(2006):292–297, 2006.
Motik, B., and Sattler, U., A comparison of reasoning techniques for querying large description logic ABoxes. Proceedings of the 13th international conference on logic for programming artificial intelligence and reasoning (LPAR 2006). 2006.
Haarslev, V., and Moller, R., Consistence testing: the RACE experience. In: Dyckhoff R (ed) Proceedings, automated reasoning with analytic tableaux and related methods. Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence. 1847:57–61, 2000.
Glimm, B., Horrocks, I., Motik, B., and Stoilos, G., HermiT: reasoning with large ontologies, http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/projects/HermiT/index.html, Computing Laboratory, Oxford University. 2009.
Mishra, R. B., and Kumar, S., Semantic web reasoners and languages. Artif. Intell. Rev. 35(4):339–368, 2010.
García-Crespo, A., Rodriguez, A., Mencke, M., Gómez-Berbís, J. M., and Colomo-Palacios, R., ODDIN: Ontology-driven differential diagnosis based on logical inference and probabilistic refinements. Expert Syst. Appl. 37(3):2621–2628, 2010.
Motik, B., Patel-schneider, P., and Parsia, B., OWL 2 Web Ontology Language, Structural specification and functional syntax. W3c Candidate recommendation. June 2009.
Rodriguez-Gonzalez, A., Fernandez, J., Jiménez, E., Mencke, M., Radzimski, M., Gómez, J. M., Alor-Hernandez, G., and Posada-Gómez, R., MedFinder: Using Semantic Web, Web 2.0 and Geolocation methods to develop a Decision Support System to locate doctors. 5th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST). 2009.
Rudolph, S., Krötzsch, M., and Hitzler, P., All Elephants are Bigger than All Mice. In Proceedings of the 21st International Workshop on Description Logics (DL-08). CEUR Workshop Proceedings 2008.
Rodriguez, A., SeDeLo Raw Data. Avalaible online at: http://nadir.uc3m.es/alejandro/pubs/sedelo/SeDeLo_Data.pdf. Last accessed: March 29, 2011
Park, S., and Lee, J. K., Rule identification using ontology while acquiring rules from Web pages. Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. 65(7):659–673, 2007.
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism, and Commerce under the project TRAZAMED (IPT-090000-2010-007).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rodríguez-González, A., Labra-Gayo, J.E., Colomo-Palacios, R. et al. SeDeLo: Using Semantics and Description Logics to Support Aided Clinical Diagnosis. J Med Syst 36, 2471–2481 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-011-9714-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-011-9714-1