An ontology building system for structuring medical diagnostic knowledge

The paper gives an overview of research devoted to developing a semi-automatic methodology of building a semantic model of medical diagnostic knowledge. The methodology can serve multiple purposes. First of all it can be a foundation for building ontologies of diseases. The same methodology can also be used for building ontologies of medical diagnostic technologies. The semantic model is applied because it allows for uniform representation of heterogenic data. In the context of medicine this allows for the fusion of heterogenic data coming from different diagnostic technologies. In consequence all the data gathered for a particular patient can be further processed with the aid of the same mathematical techniques. Thus it is easy to construct a reasoning mechanism that diagnoses the possible diseases by comparing the data obtained for a patient with the semantic models of diseases. The process of an ontology building is automatic and uses a set of natural language processing methods. The described methodology was developed specifically for the Polish language.