[Representation of knowledge in respiratory medicine: ontology should help the coding process].
BACKGROUND
Access to medical knowledge is a major issue for health professionals and requires the development of terminologies. The objective of the reported work was to construct an ontology of respiratory medicine, i.e. an organized and formalized terminology composed by specific knowledge. The purpose is to help the medico-economical coding process and to represent the relevant knowledge about the patient.


METHODS
Our researches cover the whole life cycle of an ontology, from the development of a methodology, to building it from texts, to its use in an operational system. A computerized tool, based on the ontology, allows both a medico-economical coding and a graphical medical one. This second one will be used to index hospital reports.


RESULTS
Our ontology counts 1913 concepts and contains all the knowledge included in the PMSI part of the SPLF thesaurus. Our tool has been evaluated and showed a recall of 80% and an accuracy of 85% regarding the medico-economical coding.


CONCLUSIONS
The work presented in this paper justifies the approach that has been used. It must be continued on a large scale to validate our coding principles and the possibility of making enquiries on patient reports concerning clinical research.
Blanc
F-X
FX
Unité fonctionnelle de pneumologie, service de médecine interne, CHU Bicêtre, AP-HP, 78, rue du Général-Leclerc, 94275 Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, France. xavier.blanc@bct.aphp.fr
Baneyx
A
A
Charlet
J
J
Housset
B
B
D059019:Clinical Coding; D005602:France; D015272:Pulmonary Medicine / Q000592:standards