Description Logics as information resource: as example of its application in cardiology

Abstract

This paper regards the study of terminologies, Ontology, and its inference in Description Logics. With no intent of broadening its comprehension, we depict description logics and its role as a mediator in Information and Computer Sciences and pointing at some of the most important resources that have currently caught the medical field’s attention. Based on previous writings, the main causes of death nowadays in developed and developing countries are related to cardiovascular diseases. Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) state that about 140,000 people die every year in Brazil due to heart disease. In addition, most of these deaths, including those caused by sudden illness, could be avoided by the premonitoring and the pre-diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmias and myocardial ischemia using ECG, since the electrocardiogram is one of the tools that offer fast and reliable data sets for cardiac diagnosis. This study has as a tool the analysis for the treatment and organization of digital information for its recovery, use, and reuse in a monitoring and automatic pre-diagnosis system to assist the doctor in quickly and accurately detecting cardiac arrhythmias. Therefore, the idea, in the methodological light of Information Sciences - creating, processing, preserving, and (re) using digital information - is to develop a system to generate, store, transfer, and interpret electrocardiogram information for cardiac arrhythmia diagnosis. The system should be used in health centers, mobile ICUs, hospitals and universities to assist health professionals when working on medical reports of patients with pathological abnormalities. As a result, it is expected that a system containing database of electrocardiograms, with pathologies related to clinical cases of cardiac diseases, will be introduced and approved as an assisting tool for health professionals to use throughout the process of managing information. They will prepare their patient’s clinical report to pass on information, following the principle of ubiquity, which when deployed in public health systems will provide faster assistance and accuracy in the identification of cardiac abnormalities, and patients will have specialized service. Thus, we introduce a structure of description logics and its approach in the cardiology medical environment, and we compare the use of description logics in the pathology environment by using a practical model of description logics use in terms of diseases related to the circulatory system of the human body.