Computation of semantic similarity within an ontology of breast pathology to assist inter-observer consensus

Comput Biol Med. 2006 Jul-Aug;36(7-8):768-88. doi: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2005.04.014. Epub 2005 Sep 27.

Abstract

Computer-assisted consensus in medical imaging involves automatic comparison of morphological abnormalities observed by physicians in images. We built an ontology of morphological abnormalities in breast pathology to assist inter-observer consensus. Concepts of morphological abnormalities extracted from existing terminologies, published grading systems and medical reports were organized in an taxonomic hierarchy and furthermore linked by the relation "is a diagnostic criterion of" according to diagnostic meaning. We implemented position-based, content-based and mixed semantic similarity measures between concepts in this ontology and compared the results with experts' judgment. The position-based similarity measure using both taxonomic and non-taxonomic relations performed as well as the other measures and was used for automatic comparison of morphological abnormalities within the IDEM computer-assisted consensus platform.

Publication types

  • Evaluation Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Breast / pathology*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Medical Informatics*
  • Observer Variation
  • Pathology, Clinical / statistics & numerical data
  • Semantics