Center for Evidence-Based and Translational Medicine, Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, China.
School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China.
J Evid Based Med. 2024 Sep;17(3):604-614. doi: 10.1111/jebm.12639. Epub 2024 Sep 5.
Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) for Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine (TCM and WM) are important medical documents used to assist medical decision-making and are of great significance for standardizing clinical pathways. However, due to the constraints of text format, it is difficult for Integrated TCM and WM CPGs to play a real role in medical practice. In addition, how to standardize the structure and semantic relationships between Integrated TCM and WM CPG knowledge, and realize the construction of computable, sharable and reliable CPGs, remains an urgent issue to be addressed. Therefore, we are proposing an ontology of CPGs for Integrated TCM and WM.
We first initialized domain concepts and relationships to ensure the accuracy of the ontology knowledge structure. We then screened CPGs that meet the standards for Integrated TCM and WM, analyzed and classified the contents, and extracted the common structures. Based on the seven-step ontology construction method combined with inference-complement, referring to the representation methods and hierarchical relationships of terms and concepts in MeSH, ICD-10, SNOMED-CT, and other ontologies and terminology sets, we formed the concept structure and semantic relationship tables for the ontology. We also achieved the matching and mapping between the ontology and reference ontologies and term sets. Next, we defined the aspects and constraints of properties, selected multiple Integrated TCM and WM CPGs as instances to populate, and used ontology reasoning tools and formulated defined inference rules to reason and extend the ontology. Finally, we evaluated the performance of the ontology.
The content of the Integrated TCM and WM CPGs is divided into nine parts: basic information, background, development method, clinical question, recommendation, evidence, conclusion, result, and reason for recommendations. The Integrated TCM and WM CPG ontology has 152 classes and defines 90 object properties and 114 data properties, with a maximum classification depth of 4 layers. The terms of disease, drug and examination item names in the ontology have been standardized.
This study proposes an Integrated TCM and WM CPG ontology. The ontology adopts a modular design, which has both sharing and scaling ability, and can express rich guideline knowledge. It provides important support for the semantic processing and computational application of guideline documents.
中西医结合临床实践指南（CPGs）是辅助医疗决策的重要医学文件，对于规范临床路径具有重要意义。然而，由于文本格式的限制，中西医结合 CPG 在医疗实践中难以发挥真正的作用。此外，如何规范中西医结合 CPG 知识的结构和语义关系，实现可计算、可共享和可靠的 CPG 构建，仍是亟待解决的问题。因此，我们提出了一种中西医结合 CPG 本体。
首先，我们初始化了领域概念和关系，以确保本体知识结构的准确性。然后，我们筛选了符合中西医结合标准的 CPG，对其内容进行分析和分类，并提取了常见结构。基于结合推理补充的七步本体构建方法，参考 MeSH、ICD-10、SNOMED-CT 等本体和术语集的术语和概念表示方法和层次关系，我们形成了本体的概念结构和语义关系表。我们还实现了本体与参考本体和术语集的匹配和映射。接下来，我们定义了属性的方面和约束，选择了多个中西医结合 CPG 作为实例进行填充，并使用本体推理工具和制定的推理规则对本体进行推理和扩展。最后，我们评估了本体的性能。
中西医结合 CPG 的内容分为九个部分：基本信息、背景、发展方法、临床问题、推荐、证据、结论、结果和推荐理由。中西医结合 CPG 本体有 152 个类，定义了 90 个对象属性和 114 个数据属性，最大分类深度为 4 层。本体中的疾病、药物和检查项目名称术语已标准化。
本研究提出了一种中西医结合 CPG 本体。该本体采用模块化设计，具有共享和扩展能力，能够表达丰富的指南知识，为指南文档的语义处理和计算应用提供了重要支持。
