Clinical Decision Support Systems Question and Answering

Abstract

A question answering system to help clinical practitioners in a cardiovascular healthcare environment to interface clinical decision support systems can be built by using an extended discourse representation structure, CIDERS, and an ontology framework, Ontology for General Clinical Practice. CIDERS is an extension of the well-known DRT (discourse representation theory) structures, intending to go beyond single text representation to embrace the general clinical history of a given patient represented in an ontology. The Ontology for General Clinical Practice improves the currently available state-of-the-art ontologies for medical science and for the cardiovascular specialty. The chapter shows the scientific and philosophical reasons of its present dual structure with a deeply expressive (SHOIN) terminological base (TBox) and a highly computable (EL++) assertions knowledge base (ABox). To be able to use the current reasoning techniques and methodologies, the authors made a thorough inventory of biomedical ontologies currently available in OWL2 format.