DEGEL: A hybrid, multiple-ontology framework for specification and retrieval of clinical guidelines

Yuval Shahar, Ohad Young, Erez Shalom, Alon Mayaffit, Robert Moskovitch, Alon Hessing, Maya Galperin

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

40 Scopus citations

Abstract

Clinical Guidelines are a major tool in improving the quality of medical care. However, most guidelines are in free text, not machine comprehensible, and are not easily accessible to clinicians at the point of care. We introduce a Web-based, modular, distributed architecture, the Digital Electronic Guideline Library (DeGeL), which facilitates gradual conversion of clinical guidelines from text to a formal representation in a chosen guideline ontology. The architecture supports guideline classification, semantic markup, contextsensitive search, browsing, run-time application, and retrospective quality assessment. The DeGeL hybrid meta-ontology includes elements common to all guideline ontologies, such as semantic classification, and domain knowledge. The hybrid meta-ontology also includes three guideline-content representation formats: free text, semi-structured text; and a formal representation. These formats support increasingly sophisticated computational tasks. All tools are designed to operate on all representations. We demonstrated the feasibility of the architecture and the tools for the Asbru and GEM guideline ontologies.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationArtificial Intelligence in Medicine - 9th Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine in Europe, AIME 2003, Proceedings
Pages122-131
Number of pages10
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Dec 2003
Event9th Conference on Artificial Intelligence on in Medicine in Europe, AIME 2003 - Protaras, Cyprus
Duration: 18 Oct 200322 Oct 2003

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume2780 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference9th Conference on Artificial Intelligence on in Medicine in Europe, AIME 2003
Country/TerritoryCyprus
CityProtaras
Period18/10/0322/10/03

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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