title: Ontology-based modeling of clinical practice guidelines: a clinical decision support system for breast cancer follow-up interventions at primary care settings.
abstract: Breast cancer follow-up care can be provided by family physicians after specialists complete the primary treatment. Cancer Care Nova Scotia has developed a breast cancer follow-up Clinical Practice Guideline (CPG) targeting family physicians. In this paper we present a project to computerize and deploy the said CPG in a Breast Cancer Follow-up Decision Support System (BCF-DSS) for use by family physicians in a primary care setting. We present a semantic web approach to model the CPG knowledge and employ a logic-based proof engine to execute the CPG in order to infer patient-specific recommendations. We present the three stages of the development of BCF-DSS--i.e., (a) Computerization of the paper-based CPG for Breast Cancer follow-up; (b) Development of three ontologies--i.e., the Breast Cancer Ontology, the CPG ontology based on the Guideline Element Model (GEM) and a Patient Ontology; and (c) Execution of the Breast Cancer follow-up CPG through a logic-based CPG execution engine.
authors.affiliation: NICHE Research Group, Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada.
authors.forename: Samina R
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Abidi
authors.forename: Syed S R
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Abidi
authors.forename: Sajjad
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hussain
authors.forename: Mike
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Shepherd
mesh_terms: D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000628:therapy*; D003658:Decision Making, Computer-Assisted; D020000:Decision Support Systems, Clinical; D005194:Family Practice; D006801:Humans; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled