Adaptive Ontology-based Web Information Retrieval: The TARGET Framework

Finding relevant information on the Web is difficult for most users. Although Web search applications are improving, they must be more 'intelligent' to adapt to the search domains targeted by queries, the evolution of these domains, and users' characteristics. In this paper, the authors present the TARGET framework for Web Information Retrieval. The proposed approach relies on the use of ontologies of a particular nature, called adaptive ontologies, for representing both the search domain and a user's profile. Unlike existing approaches on ontologies, the authors make adaptive ontologies adapt semi-automatically to the evolution of the modeled domain. The ontologies and their properties are exploited for domain specific Web search purposes. The authors propose graph-based data structures for enriching Web data in semantics, as well as define an automatic query expansion technique to adapt a query to users' real needs. The enriched query is evaluated on the previously defined graph-based data structures representing a set of Web pages returned by a usual search engine in order to extract the most relevant information according to user needs. The overall TARGET framework is formalized using first-order logic and fully tool supported

A Conceptual Model for Detecting Interactions among Medical Recommendations in Clinical Guidelines

Representation of clinical knowledge is still an open research topic. In particular, classical languages designed for representing clinical guidelines, which were meant for producing diagnostic and treatment plans, present limitations such as for re-using, combining, and reasoning over existing knowledge. In this paper, we address such limitations by proposing an extension of the TMR conceptual model to represent clinical guidelines that allows re-using and combining knowledge from several guidelines to be applied to patients with multimorbidities. We provide means to (semi)automatically detect interactions among recommendations that require some attention from experts, such as recommending more than once the same drug. We evaluate the model by applying it to a realistic case study involving 3 diseases (Osteoarthritis, Hypertension and Diabetes) and compare the results with two other existing methods

Generalizing the Detection of Internal and External Interactions in Clinical Guidelines

This paper presents a method for formally representing Computer-Interpretable Guidelines to deal with multimorbidity. Although some approaches for merging guidelines exist, improvements are still required for combining several sources of information and coping with possibly conflicting pieces of evidence coming from clinical studies. Our main contribution is twofold: (i) we provide general models and rules for representing guidelines that expresses evidence as causation beliefs; (ii) we introduce a mechanism to exploit external medical knowledge acquired from Linked Open Data (Drugbank, Sider, DIKB) to detect potential interactions between recommendations. We apply this framework to merge three guidelines (Osteoarthritis, Diabetes, and Hypertension) in order to illustrate the capability of this approach for detecting potential conflicts between guidelines and eventually propose alternatives

SWISH for prototyping clinical guideline interactions theory

SWISH provides a general purpose collaborative infrastructure for applying Prolog reasoning over an RDF dataset together with features that facilitates prototyping Semantic Web applications. In this paper we report on the use of SWISH for efficiently developing a prototype for detection of clinical guideline interactions. These guidelines are a set of medical recommendations meant for supporting doctors on tackling a single disease. However, often guidelines need to be combined for treating patients that suffer from multiple diseases, and then a number of interactions can occur. The generic interaction rules are implemented in SWI-Prolog and the guideline RDF-data is enriched with clinical Linked Open Data (LOD) (e.g. Drugbank, Sider). We show the implementation of the proposed theory about interaction detection in a case-study on combining three guidelines. The experiment is interactively described using a SWISH notebook and the results are graphical visualised empowered by graphviz

Inferring recommendation interactions in clinical guidelines

The formal representation of clinical knowledge is still an open research topic. Classical representation languages for clinical guidelines are used to produce diagnostic and treatment plans. However, they have important limitations, e.g. when looking for ways to re-use, combine, and reason over existing clinical knowledge. These limitations are especially problematic in the context of multimorbidity; patients that suffer from multiple diseases. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a model for clinical guidelines (TMR4I) that allows the re-use and combination of knowledge from multiple guidelines. Semantic Web technology is applied to implement the model, allowing us to automatically infer interactions between recommendations, such as recommending the same drug more than once. It relies on an existing Linked Data set, DrugBank, for identifying drug-drug interactions. We evaluate the model by applying it to two realistic case studies on multimorbidity that combine guidelines for two (Duodenal Ulcer and Transient Ischemic Attack) and three diseases (Osteoarthritis, Hypertension and Diabetes) and compare the results with existing methods

Analyzing interactions on combining multiple clinical guidelines

Accounting for patients with multiple health conditions is a complex task that requires analysing potential interactions among recommendations meant to address each condition. Although some approaches have been proposed to address this issue, important features still require more investigation, such as (re)usability and scalability. To this end, this paper presents an approach that relies on reusable rules for detecting interactions among recommendations coming from various guidelines. It extends a previously proposed knowledge representation model (TMR) to enhance the detection of interactions and it provides a systematic analysis of relevant interactions in the context of multimorbidity. The approach is evaluated in a case study on rehabilitation of breast cancer patients, developed in collaboration with experts. The results are considered promising to support the experts in this task