The HealthAgents ontology: knowledge representation in a distributed decision support system for brain tumours

In this paper we present our experience of representing the knowledge behind HealthAgents, a distributed decision support system for brain tumour diagnosis. Our initial motivation came from the distributed nature of the information involved in the system and has been enriched by clinicians’ requirements and data access restrictions. We present in detail the steps we have taken towards building our ontology starting from knowledge acquisition to data access and reasoning. We motivate our representational choices and show our results using domain examples employed by clinical partners in HealthAgents.

[1]  Nigel Shadbolt,et al.  Resource Description Framework (RDF) , 2009 .

[2]  J. Taha,et al.  An Analysis of the Respective Risks of Hematoma Formation in 361 Consecutive Morphological and Functional Stereotactic Procedures , 2002, Neurosurgery.

[3]  Erhard Rahm,et al.  A survey of approaches to automatic schema matching , 2001, The VLDB Journal.

[4]  Willard Van Orman Quine,et al.  From a Logical Point of View , 1955 .

[5]  Witham,et al.  Comprehensive assessment of hemorrhage risks and outcomes after stereotactic brain biopsy. , 2001, Journal of neurosurgery.

[6]  Pieter Wesseling,et al.  Comparison between neuroimaging classifications and histopathological diagnoses using an international multicenter brain tumor magnetic resonance imaging database. , 2006, Journal of neurosurgery.

[7]  Sabine Van Huffel,et al.  On the Design of a Web-Based Decision Support System for Brain Tumour Diagnosis Using Distributed Agents , 2006, 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology Workshops.

[8]  L. Stein,et al.  OWL Web Ontology Language - Reference , 2004 .

[9]  A. L. Rector.  Clinical terminology : Why is it so hard? : Challenges to Progresses , 1999 .

[10]  Val Tannen,et al.  Semantic Web and Databases: Second International Workshop, SWDB 2004, Toronto, Canada, August 29-30, 2004, Revised Selected Papers (Lecture Notes in Computer Science) , 2005 .

[11]  Peter C. Wright,et al.  The use of think-aloud evaluation methods in design , 1991, SGCH.

[12]  Janni Nielsen,et al.  Getting access to what goes on in people's heads?: reflections on the think-aloud technique , 2002, NordiCHI '02.

[13]  José L. V. Mejino,et al.  A reference ontology for biomedical informatics: the Foundational Model of Anatomy , 2003, J. Biomed. Informatics.

[14]  W. Quine.  On What There Is , 1948 .

[15]  Aldo Gangemi,et al.  Modelling Ontology Evaluation and Validation , 2006, ESWC.

[16]  Bo Hu,et al.  Reflections on a medical ontology , 2007, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[17]  Kathryn B. Laskey,et al.  Bayesian semantics for the semantic web , 2005 .

[18]  W. Hall.  The safety and efficacy of stereotactic biopsy for intracranial lesions , 1998, Cancer.

[19]  Thomas Lukasiewicz,et al.  Probabilistic description logic programs under inheritance with overriding for the Semantic Web , 2008, Int. J. Approx. Reason..

[20]  A. Mol.  The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice , 2003 .

[21]  H. Lan,et al.  SWRL : A semantic Web rule language combining OWL and ruleML , 2004 .

[22]  Thomas R. Gruber,et al.  A translation approach to portable ontology specifications , 1993, Knowl. Acquis..

[23]  Udo Hahn,et al.  Part-Whole Reasoning: A Case Study in Medical Ontology Engineering , 1999, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[24]  George A. Miller,et al.  WordNet: A Lexical Database for English , 1995, HLT.

[25]  Mark A. Musen,et al.  Ontology versioning in an ontology management framework , 2004, IEEE Intelligent Systems.

[26]  Ivan Herman,et al.  Graph Visualization and Navigation in Information Visualization: A Survey , 2000, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..

[27]  Sabine Van Huffel,et al.  HealthAgents: distributed multi-agent brain tumor diagnosis and prognosis , 2009, Applied Intelligence.

[28]  J. Fodor.  Having Concepts: a Brief Refutation of the Twentieth Century , 2004 .

[29]  Diego Calvanese,et al.  The Description Logic Handbook: Theory, Implementation, and Applications , 2003, Description Logic Handbook.

[30]  M. Julià-Sapé,et al.  A Multi-Centre, Web-Accessible and Quality Control-Checked Database of in vivo MR Spectra of Brain Tumour Patients , 2006, Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine.

[31]  Pedro M. Domingos,et al.  Reconciling schemas of disparate data sources: a machine-learning approach , 2001, SIGMOD '01.

[32]  Debora Shaw,et al.  Handbook of usability testing: How to plan, design, and conduct effective tests , 1996 .

[33]  Christoph Bussler,et al.  Semantic Web and Databases, Second International Workshop, SWDB 2004, Toronto, Canada, August 29-30, 2004, Revised Selected Papers , 2005, SWDB.

[34]  Pradeep Ravikumar,et al.  A Comparison of String Distance Metrics for Name-Matching Tasks , 2003, IIWeb.

[35]  Yorick Wilks,et al.  Data Driven Ontology Evaluation , 2004, LREC.

[36]  A. Rector.  Clinical Terminology: Why Is it so Hard? , 1999, Methods of Information in Medicine.