What is a Risk? A Formal Representation of Risk of Stroke for People with Atrial Fibrillation

We propose a framework for the representation of medical risks in the context of the OBO Foundry using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The framework is developed for the use case of risk of stroke for people with atrial fibrillation, for which we distinguish three classes of dispositions: the atrial fibrillation disease; the risk of stroke for a human who has atrial fibrillation; and the risk of stroke over 12 months for a human who has atrial fibrillation. The latter is quantified by risk estimates, which are informational entities extracted from documents – such as journal articles – and to which epistemic probability values can be assigned. We discuss the reference-class problem (i.e., the possibility to have several risk estimates with different epistemic probabilities for the same individual, depending on the reference class the risk estimate is based on) and clarify the philosophical hypotheses on which this dispositional framework is based.

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