Ontology-Driven Cardiovascular Decision Support System

This paper presents an ontology driven framework for the development of a clinical expert system targeted for chest pain risk assessment. The proposed ontology driven framework will deploy key components (adaptive questionnaire, patient medical history, risk assessment and decision support capabilities) which can be reused for other areas thus accomplishing a decision support system capable of handling a range of cardiovascular diseases. The adoption of ontologlies in healthcare has facilitated domain experts and non experts to perform knowledge representation tasks with great ease and without requiring any computer programming knowledge. The organization of medical knowledgebase is no longer laborious and costly business. The primary and secondary care clinicians adhere to certain specialized healthcare knowledge bases such as NICE (National Institute of Clinical Excellence guidelines in UK) in order to diagnose chest pain efficiently and also to mitigate risk of Heart attack in patients at early stages. They also store the episodic information for future reuse and for auditing purposes. Healthcare information management systems for primary and secondary care are expected to be able to communicate and exchange complex medical knowledge (often expressed in numerous languages in different parts of the world) in an efficient and unequivocal way. For the purpose of this research project we are developing a decision support system using multiple chest pain assessment guidelines.