The Anatomy of the Image: Toward an Applied Onto-Psychiatry

Abstract

Biomedical software ontologies provide a means for the representation of facts gathered through biomedical research and clinical observation. At the foundation of good software ontology design lays a sound philosophical realism that supplies the basic framework required to support the computable management of this information correctly and consistently. In numerous biomedical subdomains (such as anatomy, disease classification, or functional genomics), a good degree of success has been achieved through the realist approach. In the field of psychiatry, however, the analytic tools of ontological realism are challenged to account for subjective mental experiences that typically lay beyond their scope. Although psychiatric symptoms , such as delusions, hallucinations, or memory loss, may be too ethereal to account for in terms of a realist ontology, by focusing on some psychiatric signs , such as images of the human brain (which are in themselves subject to ontological analysis), we may be able to make some in-roads toward an application ontology of the psychiatric domain. In this paper, via the ontological framework of Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, we discuss the differences between the ontology of the body and the ontology of the image, and apply the subsequent image-ontology framework to the domain of neuroimaging. We aim to demonstrate how such an ontology may lead to the perspicuous structuring of clinical information in psychiatry and the benefits application ontologies afford may subsequently be attained within a portion of this particularly difficult domain.

Uncovering the etiology of conversion disorder: insights from functional neuroimaging

“…The general aim of functional neuroimaging studies in pathology is to identify the circuits that serve as the site of the disordered brain functions underlying abnormal cognition or behavior associated with the conditions that can facilitate the transformation of these subjective experiences into the objectively observable signs of the disorders. 11 , 12 Several recent studies have used functional brain imaging techniques in the attempt to identify specific neural correlates associated with conversion symptoms, the review of which is given in the following section.…”