Ontology-Based Knowledge Modeling to Provide Decision Support for Comorbid Diseases

Handling comorbid diseases in a decision support framework is a challenging problem as it demands the synthesis of clinical procedures for two or more diseases whilst maintaining clinical pragmatics. In this paper we present a knowledge management approach for handling comorbid diseases by the systematic alignment of the Clinical Pathways (CP) of comorbid diseases. Our approach entails: (a) knowledge synthesis to derive disease-specific CP from evidence-bases sources; (b) knowledge modeling to abstract medical and procedural knowledge from the CP; (c) knowledge representation to computerize the CP in terms of a CP ontology; and (d) knowledge alignment by aligning multiple CP to develop a unified CP knowledge model for comorbid diseases. We present the COMET system that provides decision support to handle comorbid cardiac heart failure and atrial fibrillation.