An Ontology Design Pattern for Modeling Experimental Paradigms.

We present an ontology design pattern for modeling scientific experiments and examinations conducted in a clinical research study. Integrating heterogeneous data into a common ontological model is a challenge, redoubled if we want them to be explored later. In order to facilitate the development of dedicated ontological modules, this design pattern relies on invariants, is centered on the event of the experiment, and keeps the link to the original data.

Temporal Medical Knowledge Representation Using Ontologies.

Representing temporal information is a recurrent problem for biomedical ontologies. We propose a foundational ontology that combines the so-called three-dimensional and four-dimensional approaches in order to be able to track changes in an individual and to trace his or her medical history. This requires, on the one hand, associating with any representation of an individual the representation of his or her life course and, on the other hand, distinguishing the properties that characterize this individual from those that characterize his or her life course.

Use of a modular ontology and a semantic annotation tool to describe the care pathway of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in a coordination network.

The objective of this study was to describe the care pathway of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) based on real-life textual data from a regional coordination network, the Ile-de-France ALS network. This coordination network provides care for 92% of patients diagnosed with ALS living in Ile-de-France. We developed a modular ontology (OntoPaRON) for the automatic processing of these unstructured textual data. OntoPaRON has different modules: the core, medical, socio-environmental, coordination, and consolidation modules. Our approach was unique in its creation of fully defined concepts at different levels of the modular ontology to address specific topics relating to healthcare trajectories. We also created a semantic annotation tool specific to the French language and the specificities of our corpus, the Ontology-Based Semantic Annotation Module (OnBaSAM), using the OntoPaRON ontology as a reference. We used these tools to annotate the records of 928 patients automatically. The semantic (qualitative) annotations of the concepts were transformed into quantitative data. By using these pipelines we were able to transform unstructured textual data into structured quantitative data. Based on data processing, semantic annotations, sociodemographic data for the patient and clinical variables, we found that the need and demand for human and technical assistance depend on the initial form of the disease, the motor state, and the patient age. The presence of exhaustion in care management, is related to the patient's motor and cognitive state.

Using Equivalent Classes of an Ontology to Understand Care Pathway in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

To understand the home-based difficulties encountered in the health care pathways of patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), we must annotate a large amount of textual data, from a database created by the ALS Île de France coordination network. For this purpose, we have developed a modular ontology, consisting of four modules, and a semantic annotation tool integrating the created ontology. The specificity of our approach is the creation of equivalent classes at different levels of the ontology. These equivalent classes represent variables of interest allowing a statistical approach and a clinical analysis of comprehension of care pathways ruptures causing.

A Modular Ontology for Modeling Service Provision in a Communication Network for Coordination of Care.

This paper presents a modular ontology of health care in the context in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. 4 modules cover socio-environmental, medical, and care coordination aspects of the domain. They are organized by a core module. Its goal is to understand interruptions in health care provision in the context of a neurodegenerative disease.

From Patient Discharge Summaries to an Ontology for Psychiatry.

Psychiatry aims at detecting symptoms, providing diagnoses and treating mental disorders. We developed ONTOPSYCHIA, an ontology for psychiatry in three modules: social and environmental factors of mental disorders, mental disorders, and treatments. The use of ONTOPSYCHIA, associated with dedicated tools, will facilitate semantic research in Patient Discharge Summaries (PDS). To develop the first module of the ontology we propose a PDS text analysis in order to explicit psychiatry concepts. We decided to set aside classifications during the construction of the modu le, to focus only on the information contained in PDS (bottom-up approach) and to return to domain classifications solely for the enrichment phase (top-down approach). Then, we focused our work on the development of the LOVMI methodology (Les Ontologies Validées par Méthode Interactive - Ontologies Validated by Interactive Method), which aims to provide a methodological framework to validate the structure and the semantic of an ontology.

Enrich classifications in psychiatry with textual data: an ontology for psychiatry including social concepts.

We propose a modular approach to develop an ontology of psychiatry, ONTOPSYCHIA, based on Patient Discharges Summaries (PDS) and divided into three modules (i.e. social, mental disorders and treatments). We decided to take into account the social aspects of the patient life described in PDS to consider information such as family history, social environment or education.

[Artificial intelligence meeting neuropsychology. Semantic memory in normal and pathological aging]. / L'intelligence artificielle à la rencontre de la neuropsychologie: mémoire sémantique, vieillissement normal et pathologique.

Artificial intelligence (IA) is the subject of much research, but also many fantasies. It aims to reproduce human intelligence in its learning capacity, knowledge storage and computation. In 2014, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) started the restoring active memory (RAM) program that attempt to develop implantable technology to bridge gaps in the injured brain and restore normal memory function to people with memory loss caused by injury or disease. In another IA's field, computational ontologies (a formal and shared conceptualization) try to model knowledge in order to represent a structured and unambiguous meaning of the concepts of a target domain. The aim of these structures is to ensure a consensual understanding of their meaning and a univariant use (the same concept is used by all to categorize the same individuals). The first representations of knowledge in the AI's domain are largely based on model tests of semantic memory. This one, as a component of long-term memory is the memory of words, ideas, concepts. It is the only declarative memory system that resists so remarkably to the effects of age. In contrast, non-specific cognitive changes may decrease the performance of elderly in various events and instead report difficulties of access to semantic representations that affect the semantics stock itself. Some dementias, like semantic dementia and Alzheimer's disease, are linked to alteration of semantic memory. We propose in this paper, using the computational ontologies model, a formal and relatively thin modeling, in the service of neuropsychology: 1) for the practitioner with decision support systems, 2) for the patient as cognitive prosthesis outsourced, and 3) for the researcher to study semantic memory.

Towards an automatic harmonization of the representation of medical reports to assess their similarities.

Numerous hospitals contain unexploited knowledge deposits. These often take the form of unstructured records with heterogeneous content, which, at various levels of those organizations, register past cases. Those records are for instance patient medical records. Accessing the knowledge and experience they gather would help us to handle present cases. We present here a method to normalize textual reports in foetopathology in order to constitute a proper case base that will be the target of case-based reasoning techniques. Statistics of noise and silence generated by this method on 10 cases are presented.