Research For Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinical Terminology System Based On Ontology

A standard and wide unified medical term system can provide underlying support to ensure semantic exchange of medical information which from different institutions or systems. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and western medicine is coexist in China hospital. The western medicine clinical terminologies cannot be directly applied to the TCM clinical information system, for the western medicine clinical terms (such as SNOMED CT) doesn’t cover the content of the Chinese medicine clinical terms. As a result, the traditional Chinese medicine clinical terminology system(TCMCTS) has been set up, and more than 110,000 concepts and 270,000 terms were collected, also the relationship between the concepts were set up. However, the TCMCTS still can not directly support the interoperability of the electronic medical record system(EMRS) of TCM. The system have problems such as some incorrect relationships between concepts, lack of clinical terms, and using natural language to descript definition of the concept and so on, all these limited the usage of system. How to solve the problem of TCMCTS? How to adjust the classification structure? this study discusses the method to construct the TCMCTS based on ontology.Ontology construction method is a kind of important knowledge organization method. Ontology’s main goal is to allow effective retrieval and reuse the machine readable information stored in the database. In biomedical domain ontology building usually adopts two ways of constructing, one is retrospective method such as UMLS by using some vocabulary map the different source term with each other in order to find their common sense. other is a prospective method based on ontology such as OBO Foundry by coordinating with the early stage of development. Top-ontology describes the basic concept, generally entities and relevant rules and common sense of the world. And these concept completely independent of the specific problem or field, so the top-ontology can be Shared in a large range. To construct a system of TCM clinical terms based on ontology is embodied in three aspects:first, conceptualization, explicit, formal specification expression. Second, help promote concept postcoordinated expression. Third, help with other ontology mapping, interoperability.Chapter 1:literature review. Summarized clinical terms set research, including commonly used western medicine terminology standard, the term structured set of traditional Chinese medicine. The definition of ontology, the conceptualization and formalization in detail,top-ontology such as GFO, SUMO, and BFO were introduced.Chapter 2:Preface.Chapter 3:Theoretical research of the terminology system construct based on ontology. Two ways of building biomedical domain ontology in order to solve the problem of data reuse were introduced.Chapter 4:Method research for building TCMCTS. Analyzing the characteristics of TCM theory, TCM clinical operation processes, and the language characteristics of TCM, the principles for building TCMCTS were given:follow the characteristics of TCM, based on the basic principles of ontology construction, systematic principle and practical principle.Chapter 5:Construction of TCMCTS based on ontology method. The principle of concept model and classification framework of TCMCTS were set up. The definition of each top-level concept were given.Chapter 6:Study of the relationship between two top-level concept classes.’from top to bottom’ method, that is, through medical implications to find out the relationship between the class and other classes.’from bottom to top’ method, conclude relationships between classes from the relations between concepts. Relationships between classes can provide the reference to make sure ’domain--range’ of relationship types.Chapter 7:TCMCTS compared with other classification framework. Compared with the SNOMED CT, top-ontology (SUMO, BFO),most TCMCTS concept can accord with the SUMO, BFO classification framework.Chapter 8:conclusion.Innovations include:(1) the principles and methods of constraction of TCMCTS based on ontology.(2)’domain-range’ of relationship attribute about the top-level concept of TCMCTS were set up.(3) lay a foundation to integrate top-ontology through compare the TCMCTS framework with the BFO and SUMO.