COBRA: Integration of Heterogeneous Knowledge-Bases in Medical Domain

Medical data consist of many kinds of data from different resources, such as natural language data, sound data from physical examinations, numerical data from laboratory examinations, time-series data from monitoring systems, and medical images (e.g. X-ray, Computer Tomography, and Magnetic Resonance Image). Therefore it has been pointed out that medical databases should be implemented as multidatabases. However, there have been few systems which integrate these data into multidatabases. In this paper, we report a system called COBRA (Computer-Operated Birth-defect Recognition Aid), which supports diagnosis and information retrieval of congenital malformation diseases and which also integrates natural language data, sound data, numerical data, and medical images into multidatabases on syndrome of congenital malformation. The results show that object-oriented scheme makes it easy to implement and integrate these knowledge-databases in COBRA, which suggests that these clinical databases should be implemented as object-oriented databases.