Developing a pneumonia diagnosis ontology from multiple knowledge sources

Background: Pneumonia is difficult to differentiate from other pulmonary diseases because it shares many symptoms with these diseases. Diagnosing pneumonia in clinical practice would benefit from having access to a codified representation of clinical knowledge. An ontology represents a well-established paradigm for such codification. Objectives: The goal of this research is to create Pneumonia Diagnosis Ontology (PNADO) that brings together the medical knowledge dispersed among multiple medical knowledge sources. Material and Methods: We used several clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) describing the pneumonia diagnostic process as a starting point in developing PNADO. Preliminary version of PNADO was subsequently expanded to cover a broader range of the concepts by reusing ontologies from Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry and BioPortal. PNADO was evaluated by examining relevant concepts from the pneumonia-specific systematic reviews, using patient data from the MIMIC-III clinical dataset, and by clinical domain experts. Results: PNADO is a comprehensive ontology and has a rich set of classes and properties that cover different types of pneumonia, pathogens, symptoms, clinical signs, laboratory tests and imaging, clinical findings, complications, and diagnoses. Conclusion: PNADO unifies pneumonia diagnostic concepts from multiple knowledge sources. It is available in the BioPortal repository.