An Ontology-Based Framework for Linking Heterogeneous Medical Data

Abstract

Clinical records contain a massive heterogeneity number of data, generally written in free-note without a linguistic standard. Other forms of medical data include medical images with/without metadata (e.g., CT, MRI, radiology, etc.), audios (e.g., transcriptions, ultrasound), videos (e.g., surgery recording), and structured data (e.g., laboratory test results, age, year, weight, billing, etc.). Consequently, to retrieve the knowledge from these data is not trivial task. Handling the heterogeneity besides largeness and complexity of these data is a challenge. The main purpose of this paper is proposing a framework with two-fold. Firstly, it achieves a semantic-based integration approach, which resolves the heterogeneity issue during the integration process of healthcare data from various data sources. Secondly, it achieves a semantic-based medical retrieval approach with enhanced precision. Our experimental study on medical datasets demonstrates the significant accuracy and speedup of the proposed framework over existing approaches.