Title
An Ontology for Clinical Trial Data Integration
Abstract
A set of well-integrated clinical terminologies is at the core of delivering an efficient clinical trial system. The design and outcomes of a clinical trial can be improved significantly through an unambiguous and consistent set of clinical terminologies used in a participating clinical institute. However, due to lack of generalised legal and technical standards, heterogeneity exists between prominent clinical terminologies as well as within and between clinical systems at several levels, e.g., data, schema, and medical codes. This article specifically addresses the problem of integrating local or proprietary clinical terminologies with the globally defined universal concepts or terminologies. To deal with the problem of ambiguous, inconsistent, and overlapping clinical terminologies, domain and knowledge representation specialists have been repeatedly advocated the use of formal ontologies. We address two key challenges in developing an ontology-based clinical terminology (1) an ontology building methodology for clinical terminologies that are separated in global and local layers, and (2) aligning global and local clinical terminologies. We present Semantic Electronic Health Record (SEHR) ontology that covers multiple sub-domains of Healthcare and Life Sciences (HCLS) through specialisation of the upper-level Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). One of the main features of SEHR is layering and adaptation of local clinical terminologies with the upper-level BFO. Our empirical evaluation shows an agreement of clinical experts confirming SEHR's usability in clinical trials.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/SMC.2013.553
SMC
Keywords
Field
DocType
clinical institute,clinical terminology,clinical system,ontology-based clinical terminology,clinical trial data integration,prominent clinical terminology,local clinical terminology,clinical trial,overlapping clinical terminology,clinical expert,efficient clinical trial system,law,data integration
Ontology (information science),Ontology alignment,Ontology-based data integration,Ontology,Information retrieval,Process ontology,Open Biomedical Ontologies,Computer science,Basic Formal Ontology,Upper ontology
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1062-922X
4
0.45
References 
Authors
15
17