Aligning medical domain ontologies for clinical query extraction

Abstract

Often, there is a need to use the knowledge from multiple ontologies. This is particularly the case within the context of medical imaging, where a single ontology is not enough to provide the complementary knowledge about anatomy, radiology and diseases that is required by the related applications. Consequently, semantic integration of these different but related types of medical knowledge that is present in disparate domain ontologies becomes necessary. Medical ontology alignment addresses this need by identifying the semantically equivalent concepts across multiple medical ontologies. The resulting alignments can then be used to annotate the medical images and related patient text data. A corresponding semantic search engine that operates on these annotations (i.e. alignments) instead of simple keywords can, in this way, deliver the clinical users a coherent set of medical image and patient text data.