Assessing an ontology for the representation of clinical protocols in decision support systems

In order to assess the expressiveness of the CompGuide ontology for Clinical Practice Guidelines, a study was conducted with fourteen students of the Integrated Masters in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Minho in Portugal to whom it was proposed the representation of multiple guidelines according to the ontology. They were then asked to evaluate the ontology through a questionnaire and written reports. Although the results seem promising, there is the need for significant improvements mainly in: the representation of medication prescriptions, the tasks used to retrieve information from the patient, the diversity of actions offered by the ontology, the expressiveness of conditions regarding the state of a patient, and temporal constraints.FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologiainfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Operationalizing prostate cancer clinical pathways: An ontological model to computerize, merge and execute institutionspecific clinical pathways

Abstract. The computerization of paper-based Clinical Pathways (CP) can allow them to be operationalized as a decision-support and care planning tool at the point-of-care. We applied a knowledge management approach to computerize the prostate cancer CP for three different locations. We present a new prostate cancer CP ontology that features the novel merging of multiple CP based on the similarities of their diagnostic-treatment concepts, whilst maintaining the unique aspects of each specific CP, to realize a common unified CP model. In this paper we will highlight the main components of our prostate cancer CP ontology, and discuss the concept of CP branching and merging nodes. We conclude that our computerized CP can be executed through a logic-based engine to realize a point-of-care decision-support system for managing prostate cancer care.