A Comprehensive Fuzzy Ontology-Based Decision Support System for Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis

The World Health Organization (WHO) indicates that the proportion of the elderly will soon include nearly a quarter of the world population. Ensuring that health systems are prepared to deal with this phenomenal rate of aging and associated diseases generates many challenges. Among these challenges is facing Alzheimer's Disease (AD) that may occur at some point in the elderly life and may harm societies. AD is considered a neurological, psychological, mental, and health setback. The Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) can improve patient care and support many medical functions, such as diagnosing diseases that can reduce preventable harm. This research's main objective is to design, implement, and evaluate the Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis Ontology (ADDO). It is a comprehensive semantic knowledge base toward the development of fuzzy ontology-based CDSS for AD diagnosis. ADDO can serve as a core component of CDSS, which provides representation, annotation, and access to aspects related to AD's study and diagnosis. Toward the management of this objective, ADDO is based on the essentials of the Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) and follows the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and the Ontology for General Medical Sciences (OGMS) principles. ADDO focuses on representing the patient characteristics, complications, drugs, diagnosis examination tests, and key aspects of their periodic visits in a standard way. The possibility of semantic interoperability is taken into account by integrating ADDO and a heterogeneous AD dataset. We used ADNI as a case study to mapping a set of real instances. To manage the medical domain's uncertainty, ADDO is extended to fuzzy ontology to accommodate the medical linguistic variables and enhance diagnosis results' efficiency. ADDO is constructed using Protégé 5.5.0 software and evaluated using the HermiT reasoner and SPARQL semantic queries. ADDO currently includes 7060 concepts, 99 properties, 46274 axioms, and 30708 annotations. As a result, ADDO is consistent and more reliable in managing most AD aspects than other existing AD ontologies.