Tapia Jose Luis, Goldberg Louis J
Department of Oral Diagnostic Sciences, School of Dental Medicine, University at Buffalo, 355 Squire Hall, 3435 Main Street, Buffalo, NY 14214, USA.
Head Neck Pathol. 2011 Dec;5(4):376-84. doi: 10.1007/s12105-011-0300-0. Epub 2011 Sep 14.
An important inconsistency currently exists in the literature on oral cancer. Reviewing this literature, one finds that the term oral cancer is defined and described with great variation. In a search in PubMed, at least 17 different terms were found for titles of papers reporting data on oral cancer. The variability of the terms used for designating anatomic regions and type of malignant neoplasms for reporting oral cancer has hampered the ability of researchers to effectively retrieve information concerning oral cancer. Therefore, it is sometimes extremely difficult to provide meaningful comparisons among various studies of oral cancer. Recently, a new ontological strategy that is rooted in consensus-based controlled vocabularies has been proposed to improve the consistency of data in dental research (Smith et al. in J Am Dent Assoc 141:1173-1175, 2010). In this paper, we analyzed the terminology dilemma on oral cancer and explained the current situation. We proposed a possible solution to the dilemma using an ontology-based approach. The advantages for applying this strategy are also discussed.
目前，口腔癌领域的文献存在一个重要的不一致性问题。在回顾这些文献时，人们发现“口腔癌”这一术语的定义和描述存在很大差异。在PubMed数据库中进行搜索时，发现至少有17种不同的术语用于报道口腔癌数据的论文标题。用于指定口腔癌报告中解剖区域和恶性肿瘤类型的术语的变异性，阻碍了研究人员有效检索有关口腔癌信息的能力。因此，有时很难在各种口腔癌研究之间进行有意义的比较。最近，有人提出了一种基于共识控制词汇的新本体策略，以提高牙科研究数据的一致性（Smith等人，《美国牙科协会杂志》，2010年，第141卷，第1173 - 1175页）。在本文中，我们分析了口腔癌术语的困境并解释了当前情况。我们提出了一种基于本体的方法来解决这一困境。还讨论了应用该策略的优点。
