Context-based ontology building support in clinical domains using formal concept analysis.
OBJECTIVE
Ontology in clinical domains is becoming a core research field in the realm of medical informatics. The objective of this study is to explore the potential role of formal concept analysis (FCA) in a context-based ontology building support in a clinical domain (e.g. cardiovascular medicine here).


METHODS
We developed an ontology building support system that integrated an FCA module with a natural language processing (NLP) module. The user interface of the system was developed as a Protégé-2000 JAVA tab plug-in. A collection of 368 textual discharge summaries and a standard dictionary of Japanese diagnostic terms (MEDIS ver2.0) were used as the main knowledge sources. A preliminary evaluation was taken to show the usefulness of the system.


RESULTS
Stability was shown on the MEDIS-based medical concept extraction with high precision. 73+/-14% (mean+/-S.D.) of the compound medical phrases extracted were sufficiently meaningful to form a medical concept from a clinical perspective. Also, 57.7% of attribute implication pairs (i.e. medical concept pairs) extracted were identified as positive from a clinical perspective.


CONCLUSIONS
Under the framework of our ontology building support system using FCA, the clinical experts could reach a mass of both linguistic information and context-based knowledge that was demonstrated as useful to support their ontology building tasks.
Jiang
Guoqian
G
Department of Medical Informatics, Hokkaido University Graduate School of Medicine, North 15, West 7, Kita-ku, Sapporo 060-8638, Japan. guoqian@med.hokudai.ac.jp
Ogasawara
Katsuhiko
K
Endoh
Akira
A
Sakurai
Tsunetaro
T
D020000:Decision Support Systems, Clinical; D003953:Diagnosis-Related Groups; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D008037:Linguistics; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000639:trends*; D012984:Software; D009626:Terminology as Topic