Ontology-based Semantic Integration Scheme for Medical Image Grid

Ontology is becoming a key for grid platform to support the composition of heterogeneous resources by means of processing resource description and enactment. MedlmGrid (Medical Image Grid) aims to archive, access, and analyze medical data from distributed healthcare information systems to adapt to the development of healthcare information infrastructure. But the heterogeneities of those systems, especially the semantic gulfs, hamper their interoperations in grid environment. In this paper, we propose an OSIS (ontology-based semantic integration scheme) for MedlmGrid, which adopts a hybrid method to build MedlmGrid ontologies and unifies its information exchange model with HL7 (Health Level 7) v3 protocol. The MedlmGrid ontologies share the same vocabulary to simplify the knowledge discovery and semantic transformation within distributed environment. The rule-based ontology mapping components are also designed to support semantic operations of MedlmGrid. We test the performances of our scheme with simulation experiments to evaluate the feasibility of our approach.