Biomedical subjects

Domenico M Pisanelli

Publications and source records attributed to Domenico M Pisanelli.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

The unexpected high practical value of medical ontologies.

Ontology is no longer a mere research topic, but its relevance has been recognized in several practical fields. Current applications areas include natural language translation, e-commerce, geographic information systems, legal information systems and biology and medicine. It is the backbone of solid and effective applications in health care and can help to build more powerful and more interoperable medical information systems. The design and implementation of ontologies in medicine is mainly focused on the re-organization of medical terminologies. This is obviously a difficult task and requires a deep analysis of the structure and the concepts of such terminologies, in order to define domain ontologies able to provide both flexibility and consistency to medical information systems. The aim of this special issue of Computers in Biology and Medicine is to report the current evolution of research in biomedical ontologies, presenting both papers devoted to methodological issues and works with a more applicative emphasis.

Computational Biology↗

PubMed2005

Ontologies supporting continuity of care: the case of heart failure.

Heart failure can be the final stage of almost any type of cardiovascular diseases. Such diseases are the leading cause of recurrent hospital stay and mortality in developed countries, and an increasingly important cause of morbidity and mortality in developing countries. In consideration of the growing incidence of this syndrome, the Province of Trento (Northern Italy) supports a research project called e-Heart Failure. The aims of this project include the implementation of a web-based patient record management system which must allow all the professionals involved in the care process to provide a shared and continuous care. This paper emphasizes the role of ontologies in supporting the continuity of care. In a complex scenario where multiple agents co-operate in order to allow continuity of care, ontologies are the essential glue to ensure semantic consistency to data and knowledge shared by the different actors involved in the process, including patients and their families.

Continuity of Patient Care↗

PubMed2004

Coping with medical polysemy in the semantic web: the role of ontologies.

Polysemy is the linguistic phenomenon by which a term has more than one meaning. It is not a negligible issue in information management, since an effective and unambiguous sharing of the semantic content of data among different databases or knowledge repositories is needed. The paper illustrates a case of polysemy (concerning inflammation), and puts it within the framework provided by the DOLCE+ foundational ontology. This solution enables us to formally represent several senses of inflammation, and their interrelationships. This we take as a demonstration of how ontologies play an essential role in providing precisely the conceptual foundations that are needed in order to make the intended meaning of natural language expressions available to all the (artificial or human) agents that could be involved in the semantic web

Humans↗

PubMed2004

If ontology is the solution, what is the problem?

In this paper we show the usefulness of an ontological approach for solving some problems arising in medicine. We point out the relevance of terminological ontologies for disambiguating polysemous terms, for re-organizing very large corpora and detecting possible inconsistencies and for managing a catalog of bio-medical equipments. We also put in evidence the fundamental role played by ontologies when integration and interoperability of heterogeneous knowledge sources is needed, in particular in the field of clinical guidelines and evidence-based medicine.

Biomedical Engineering↗

PubMed2004

An ontological framework for the implementation of clinical guidelines in health care organizations.

The paper presents the outlines of an ontology of plans and guidelines, which is then used as the basis for a framework for implementing guideline-based systems for the management of workflow in health care organizations. The framework has a number of special features, above all in that it enables us to represent in formal terms assignments of work-items both to individuals and to teams and to tailor guideline to specific contexts of application in health care organizations. It is designed also to enable implementations to do justice to the fact that the processes carried out in health care organizations may deviate in different ways from the norms set forth in corresponding guideline definitions. This means that implementations built in conformity with the framework will be marked by a type of flexibility that might make them more likely to be accepted by healthcare professionals than are standard guideline-based management systems.

Medical Informatics↗

PubMed2003

An ontological approach to evidence-based medicine and meta-analysis.

The "evidence-based medicine" (EBM) paradigm is centered on the concept of "best evidence" and clinical studies based on this approach are more likely to be considered by physicians in their practice. In this paper we describe an ontology representing the concepts involved in evidence-based medicine and meta-analysis and show how an ontological approach can be applied both for revisiting EBM conceptual foundations and for allowing a more effective knowledge-based information retrieval in literature.

Decision Support Systems, Clinical↗