Using reference ontology to elicit attributes of brain tumors database

Multidisciplinary approach to treatment planning of brain tumors is a worldwide increasingly practice; this approach is achieved using multidisciplinary team meetings (MDTM) to discuss cases. Some studies point the lack of information to the team members as a major problem of MDTM. To overcome this problem, we propose an information system called SATTC (the Portuguese acronym for Support System for Brain Tumor's Therapeutic Planning). Starting with database modeling, a considerable problem emerged: finding some extra time in the agenda of medical practitioners for attributes elicitation workshops. To overcome this problem, we attempted an alternative method: using a reference ontology, particularly the NCI Thesaurus. Therefore, this paper proposes the use of NCI Thesaurus to elicit attributes of a Brain Tumors database. The method has been evaluated by comparing database attributes that were obtained using the proposed method versus the traditional method. This comparison showed a good outcome for the proposed method, which obtained 109 attributes compared with 101 discovered by elicitation workshops.