Semantic Integration of Cervical Cancer Data Repositories to Facilitate Multicenter Association Studies: The ASSIST Approach

Abstract

The current work addresses the unification of Electronic Health Records related to cervical cancer into a single medical knowledge source, in the context of the EU-funded ASSIST research project. The project aims to facilitate the research for cervical precancer and cancer through a system that virtually unifies multiple patient record repositories, physically located in different medical centers/hospitals, thus, increasing flexibility by allowing the formation of study groups “on demand” and by recycling patient records in new studies. To this end, ASSIST uses semantic technologies to translate all medical entities (such as patient examination results, history, habits, genetic profile) and represent them in a common form, encoded in the ASSIST Cervical Cancer Ontology. The current paper presents the knowledge elicitation approach followed, towards the definition and representation of the disease’s medical concepts and rules that constitute the basis for the ASSIST Cervical Cancer Ontology. The proposed approach constitutes a paradigm for semantic integration of heterogeneous clinical data that may be applicable to other biomedical application domains.

Human papillomavirus E7 protein detection as a method of triage to colposcopy of HPV positive women, in comparison to genotyping and cytology. Final results of the PIPAVIR study

“…Women positive for cytology or hrHPV were referred to colposcopy. Colposcopic evaluation was performed according to the ASSIST colposcopy Code 1–3, which also corresponds to the 2011 colposcopic terminology of the International Federation for Cervical Pathology and Colposcopy . Multiple microbiopsies and/or ECC (in case of invisible transformation zone) were taken given an abnormal colposcopic impression.…”

Analysis of 4 Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms in Relation to Cervical Dysplasia and Cancer Development Using a High-Throughput Ligation-Detection Reaction Procedure

“…The medical rule and procedural logic for SI definition was described by Agorastos et al 7 Subjects in the control group were referred to as SI 0-1 (normal to mild dysplasia, including PAP I-IIID and low-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion/cervical intraepithelial neoplasia [CIN]). Subjects in the case group had SI 2 or 3 (severe dysplasia to cervical cancer, including 9PAP IIID and highgrade squamous intraepithelial lesion/CIN II-III or invasive squamous carcinoma and adenocarcinoma).…”

“…Therefore, we applied a new approach that is inferencing by semantic integration of the different clinical diagnoses and is assigning a severity index (SI) for each patient. 7 Also a multiplex ligation-dependent polymerase chain reaction (PCR) approach 8 was designed for SNP analysis using low-input genomic DNA (Fig. 1).…”

Semantic Knowledge Based Approach for Product Maintenance Support

“…Also, within the area of information and process integration, there are companies such as Metatomix, Ontoprise and Radar Networks who just recently announced its "Twine semantic social networks offering" Google also announced that it was changing the way in which search engines interpret words entered by users which highlights the importance of semantics [16]. Research has proved recently that semantic technology has been used within medical centres [17] and also within the financial Industry [18]. This type of technology is highly required within the defence equipment support market for the capture & maintenance of complex knowledge; however, semantic technology is not being utilised.…”