Developing a pneumonia diagnosis ontology from multiple knowledge sources.
Journal:
Health informatics journal
Published Date:
Jan 1, 2022
Abstract
Pneumonia is difficult to differentiate from other pulmonary diseases because it shares many symptoms with these diseases. Diagnosing pneumonia in clinical practice would benefit from having access to a codified representation of clinical knowledge. An ontology represents a well-established paradigm for such codification. The goal of this research is to create Pneumonia Diagnosis Ontology (PNADO) that brings together the medical knowledge dispersed among multiple medical knowledge sources. We used several clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) describing the pneumonia diagnostic process as a starting point in developing PNADO. Preliminary version of PNADO was subsequently expanded to cover a broader range of the concepts by reusing ontologies from Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry and BioPortal. PNADO was evaluated by examining relevant concepts from the pneumonia-specific systematic reviews, using patient data from the MIMIC-III clinical dataset, and by clinical domain experts. PNADO is a comprehensive ontology and has a rich set of classes and properties that cover different types of pneumonia, pathogens, symptoms, clinical signs, laboratory tests and imaging, clinical findings, complications, and diagnoses. PNADO unifies pneumonia diagnostic concepts from multiple knowledge sources. It is available in the BioPortal repository.