An ontology-based tool for modeling and documenting events in neurosurgery.

BACKGROUND: Intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IOM) plays a pivotal role in enhancing patient safety during neurosurgical procedures. This vital technique involves the continuous measurement of evoked potentials to provide early warnings and ensure the preservation of critical neural structures. One of the primary challenges has been the effective documentation of IOM events with semantically enriched characterizations. This study aimed to address this challenge by developing an ontology-based tool. METHODS: We structured the development of the IOM Documentation Ontology (IOMDO) and the associated tool into three distinct phases. The initial phase focused on the ontology's creation, drawing from the OBO (Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology) principles. The subsequent phase involved agile software development, a flexible approach to encapsulate the diverse requirements and swiftly produce a prototype. The last phase entailed practical evaluation within real-world documentation settings. This crucial stage enabled us to gather firsthand insights, assessing the tool's functionality and efficacy. The observations made during this phase formed the basis for essential adjustments to ensure the tool's productive utilization. RESULTS: The core entities of the ontology revolve around central aspects of IOM, including measurements characterized by timestamp, type, values, and location. Concepts and terms of several ontologies were integrated into IOMDO, e.g., the Foundation Model of Anatomy (FMA), the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) and the ontology for surgical process models (OntoSPM) related to general surgical terms. The software tool developed for extending the ontology and the associated knowledge base was built with JavaFX for the user-friendly frontend and Apache Jena for the robust backend. The tool's evaluation involved test users who unanimously found the interface accessible and usable, even for those without extensive technical expertise. CONCLUSIONS: Through the establishment of a structured and standardized framework for characterizing IOM events, our ontology-based tool holds the potential to enhance the quality of documentation, benefiting patient care by improving the foundation for informed decision-making. Furthermore, researchers can leverage the semantically enriched data to identify trends, patterns, and areas for surgical practice enhancement. To optimize documentation through ontology-based approaches, it's crucial to address potential modeling issues that are associated with the Ontology of Adverse Events.

Developing an Ontology for Documenting Adverse Events While Avoiding Pitfalls.

Ontologies promise more benefits than terminologies in terms of data annotation and computer-assisted reasoning, by defining a hierarchy of terms and their relations within a domain. Here, we present central insights related to the development of an ontology for documenting events during interoperative neuromonitoring (IOM), for which we used the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as an upper-level ontology. This work has the following two goals: to describe the development of the IOM ontology and to guide the practice with respect to documenting of biomedical events, as available ontologies pose difficulties on certain issues. We address the following issues: (i) differentiate between the sets documentation, identification, continuant and explanation, understanding, occurrent as we had problems in applying the available ontology of adverse events, (ii) covering diseases and injuries in a consistent way, and (iii) deciding on which level to define relations.

Digital Health Intervention to Support Refugees in Switzerland.

Experiences of war and persecution often lead to mental health problems, resulting in post-traumatic stress disorders. In this work, we design a digital platform that aims at helping refugees coming to Switzerland by providing exercises for their mental health and information about daily life in Switzerland. In collaboration with the Swiss Red Cross (SRC), we collected requirements and developed a concept for information provision through in this platform. The architecture of a progressive web application (PWA) was identified as to best fulfill the given requirements. Based on the collected requirements mockups were created. In user interviews, we received feedback regarding the future system. We learned that the platform should include an avatar, which guides the user through the entire platform and asks questions. All texts should be accessible by a read-aloud function and exercises should be provided as videos. In summary, we learned that it is essential to involve the future user group in the development process since it is characterized by cultural diversity that has to be considered in the development and design. Enriched by this input, the next step is to realize the application in terms of a prototype.