Authors:
Satoshi Nishimura
1
;
Genma Nishijima
1
;
Yoshinobu Kitamura
1
;
Munehiko Sasajima
2
;
Toshihiro Takeda
1
;
Yasushi Matsumura
1
and
Riichiro Mizoguchi
3
Affiliations:
1
Osaka University, Japan
;
2
Osaka University and YMP-Mundus Corporation, Japan
;
3
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Keyword(s):
Action Model, Clinical Pathways, Knowledge Representation, Ontology Engineering.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Cardiovascular Technologies
;
Computing and Telecommunications in Cardiology
;
Data Engineering
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Health Engineering and Technology Applications
;
Health Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Knowledge Management
;
Medical and Nursing Informatics
;
Ontologies and the Semantic Web
;
Society, e-Business and e-Government
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
Abstract:
Much procedural knowledge in the medical domain, such as clinical practice guidelines, nursing manuals, and clinical pathways (abbreviated to CPs), is documented and shared. This paper concentrates on the CP, which represents a standard time-sequence of actions carried out by clinical staff for each disease. With the aim not of replacing the conventional form of CPs in a clinical setting but of facilitating description and revision of knowledge by knowledge managers, we have proposed CHARM, which is a goal-oriented, tree-structured model based on an ontology of actions. The aim of the work described in this paper is to confirm the practical ability of CHARM to represent medical actions in CPs in a computer-interpretable way, using eight real CPs in Osaka University Hospital. CHARM trees in terms of actions defined clearly in the ontology explicitly represent goals of actions, i.e., why the actions should be needed, and so on, which are implicit in the conventional CPs. We also confir
med the benefits of CHARM for describing/revising CPs by the knowledge mangers in a comparison of the actions in CPs, such as finding commonality among CPs, easy comparison of CPs from a goal-oriented perspective, and explanation of the reasons for differences.
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