COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly spread across the world since its arrival in December 2019 from Wuhan, China. This pandemic has disrupted the health of the citizens in such a way that the impact is enormous in terms of economy and social aspects. Education, employment, income, well-being of the humankind is affected very crucially by this corona virus. Nations worldwide are struggling to battle this emergency. Intensive studies are being carried out to control this pandemic by researchers all over the world. Medical science has advanced a lot with the application of computer assisted solutions in health care. Ontology based clinical decision support systems (CDSS) assist medical practitioners in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. They are well known in data sharing, interoperability, knowledge reuse, and decision support. This research article presents the development of ontology for SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) to be used in a CDSS, which is proposed in the satellite clinics of Royal Oman Police (ROP), Sultanate of Oman. The key concepts and the concept relationships of COVID-19 is represented using an ontology. Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) is used to model the rules related to the initial diagnosis of the patient and Semantic Query Enhanced Web Rule Language (SQWRL) is used to retrieve the data stored in the ontology. The developed ontology successfully classified the patients into one of the different categories as non-suspected, suspected, probable, and confirmed. The reasoning time and the query execution time is found to be optimal.
Introduction: Humankind is passing through a period of significant instability and a worldwide health catastrophe that has never been seen before. COVID-19 spread over the world at an unprecedented rate. In this context, we undertook a rapid research project in the Sultanate of Oman. We developed ecovid19 application, an ontology-based clinical decision support system (CDSS) with teleconference capability for easy, fast diagnosis and treatment for primary health centers/Satellite Clinics of the Royal Oman Police (ROP) of Sultanate of Oman.Materials and Methods: The domain knowledge and clinical guidelines are represented using ontology. Ontology is one of the most powerful methods for formally encoding medical knowledge. The primary data was from the ROP hospital's medical team, while the secondary data came from articles published in reputable journals. The application includes a COVID-19 Symptom checker for the public users with a text interface and an AI-based voice interface and is available in English and Arabic. Based on the given information, the symptom checker provides recommendations to the user. The suspected cases will be directed to the nearby clinic if the risk of infection is high. Based on the patient's current medical condition in the clinic, the CDSS will make suitable suggestions to triage staff, doctors, radiologists, and lab technicians on procedures and medicines. We used Teachable Machine to create a TensorFlow model for the analysis of X-rays. Our CDSS also has a WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication system) based teleconferencing option for communicating with expert clinicians if the patient develops difficulties or if expert opinion is requested.Results: The ROP hospital's specialized doctors tested our CDSS, and the user interfaces were changed based on their suggestions and recommendations. The team put numerous types of test cases to assess the clinical efficacy. Precision, sensitivity (recall), specificity, and accuracy were adequate in predicting the various categories of patient instances.Conclusion: The proposed CDSS has the potential to significantly improve the quality of care provided to Oman's citizens. It can also be tailored to fit other terrifying pandemics.
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