Transcript EON project

Using Ontologies in
Clinical Decision
Support Applications
Samson W. Tu
Stanford Medical Informatics
Stanford University
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Main points
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Information technology has the potential to
advance patient care by improving clinician
adherence to clinical practice guidelines
Principled architecture that separates
ontologies, knowledge bases, and problemsolving components allows development
and deployment of maintainable complex
software systems
EON and ATHENA projects demonstrate
use of ontologies in clinical decision support
applications
EON project
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NLM-funded project at Stanford (PI: Dr. Musen)
Develop methodology, ontologies, and software
components for creating decision-support
system for guideline-based care
Use Protégé knowledge-acquisition
methodology and tool for construction of
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Develop software components that assist
clinicians in specific tasks
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Domain concept ontologies
Patient information model
Guideline knowledge bases
Therapy-advisory and eligibility-determination servers
Database mediator for time-oriented queries
Explanation and visualization facilities
EON architecture
Patient
Database
Servers
Temporal
Mediator
Protégé
Knowledge
Base
EON
Guideline
Ontology
Medical Domain
Ontology
Patient
Data Model
Guidelines
Protégé
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Clients Clients
Protocol
Eligibility
Checker
Yenta
Eligibility
Yenta
Client
Therapy
Advisory
Server
Advisory
Yenta
Yenta
Client
ATHENA project
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Funded by VA Research Service HSR&D (PIs: Drs. Hoffman
and Goldstein, VA clinicians and Stanford faculties)
Hypothesized that guideline-based interventions in
management of hypertension can
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Deployed and evaluated at primary care VA clinics in 9
geographically diverse cities over a 15-month clinical trial
Results
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Change physicians’ prescribing behavior
Change patient outcome
Expert clinicians maintain hypertension knowledge base
using Protégé
Clinicians interacted with the ATHENA Hypertension
Advisory at 54% of all patient visits
Impact on prescribing behavior and change patient outcome
being analyzed
Building ATHENA system
from EON components
VA CPRS
EON Servers
VA DHCP
Patient
Database
Data Converter
nightly data
extraction
Guideline
Knowledge
Base
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Temporal
Mediator
Guideline
Interpreter
Protégé
ATHENA Clients
ATHENA Clients
Event
Event
Monitor
Monitor
Advisory
Advisory
Client
Client
ATHENA GUI
What the Clinician Sees…
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ATHENA HTN Advisory
BP targets
Primary
recommendation
Drug
recommendation
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ATHENA HTN Advisory: More Info
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ATHENA HTN Advisory: Link to
evidence base
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EON ontologies
Generic data types (generalize to HL7 data types)
Medical concept ontology (generalizes to standard
terminologies)
Patient information model (generalizes to HL7 RIM)
Guideline ontology
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Physician-maintained
hypertension knowledge base
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Benefits of ontology-based
clinical information systems
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Separation of declarative domain knowledge and
procedural problem-solving knowledge allow
 Content experts to maintain knowledge bases
 Standardization of ontologies that leads to sharing
and interoperability
Semantically rich ontologies allow sophisticated
reasoning and decision support
 e.g., automatic concept classification based on
description logic
 e.g., detailed drug recommendations based on
computable model of clinical practice guidelines