Automating the Integration of Clinical Studies into Medical Ontologies

A popular approach to knowledge extraction from clinical databases is to first define an ontology of the concepts one wishes to model and subsequently, use these concepts to test various hypotheses and make predictions about a person's future health and well being. The challenge for medical experts is in the time taken to map between their concepts/hypotheses and information contained within clinical studies. Presently, most of this work is performed manually. We have developed a method to generate links between Risk Factors in a medical ontology and the questions and result data in longitudinal studies. This can then be exploited to express complex queries based on domain concepts, to extract knowledge from external studies.