Constructing Medical Image Domain Ontology with Anatomical Knowledge

Abstract

Extracting information from the medical imaging reports with domain ontology has attracted much attention in medical natural language processing field. Based on the unstructured characteristics of medical image report text, the existing image report domain ontology is constructed by ontology learning method, including ontology learning method based on language and ontology learning method based on machine learning. However, these existing methods ignore the anatomical knowledge embedded in medical imaging reports, which is very useful for extracting entity relationships from reports. In order to solve the above problems, this paper proposes a domain ontology construction method for medical image reporting based on anatomy knowledge, which combines the prior knowledge of pathology and anatomy to obtain the basic framework of the domain ontology as the knowledge driver. In particular, our proposed approach consists of two tasks. The first task is to convert each text report into a semantic tree through an anatomic knowledge based semantic subtree generation algorithm. Semantic subtree generation algorithm mainly consists of three parts: framework positioning, relation extraction and adding relation. Firstly, the text is located based on anatomical knowledge, and the relational extraction mainly adopts the method of dependency syntactic analysis to extract the three semantic relations contained in the text. Finally, add the relationship to the corresponding branch. The second task is to obtain the domain ontology by merging semantic subtree. This step is mainly to obtain the domain ontology by merging the nodes of the XML structure semantic tree. The experimental results show that this method can be used for relational extraction and domain ontology construction, laying a good foundation for the follow-up research.