HEPO: The hepatitis ontology for abductive medical diagnostic systems

The use of the ontologies has been prevalent in many domains especially in medical diagnostic systems. Ontologies exhibit features including knowledge representation, reusability, sharing, and logical reasoning support. Thus ontology-driven medical diagnostic systems can assist physicians in order to determine the most probable diagnosis of the patients. Traditionally, these systems have used deductive or inductive way of reasoning for assisting physicians. Nevertheless, the abductive reasoning has less explored in the literature. Further, numerous ontologies have been developed for diagnoses diseases such as diabetes, cancer, chronic and inflammatory. However, no such ontology was found in the literature that deals with a hepatitis disease. Hence, in this paper, the hepatitis ontology ‘HEPO’ has been developed and validated for designing abductive medical diagnostic systems.