Towards the semantic enrichment of Computer Interpretable Guidelines: a method for the identification of relevant ontological terms

Abstract

Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) contain recommendations intended to optimize patient care, produced based on a systematic review of evidence. In turn, Computer-Interpretable Guidelines (CIGs) are formalized versions of CPGs for use as decision-support systems. We consider the enrichment of the CIG by means of an OWL ontology that describes the clinical domain of the CIG, which could be exploited e.g. for the interoperability with the Electronic Health Record (EHR). As a first step, in this paper we describe a method to support the development of such an ontology starting from a CIG. The method uses an alignment algorithm for the automated identification of ontological terms relevant to the clinical domain of the CIG, as well as a web platform to manually review the alignments and select the appropriate ones. Finally, we present the results of the application of the method to a small corpus of CIGs.