Design and Construction of Nuclear Medicine Ontology

Abstract

Introduction: Considering the important role of ontologies in information organization and increasing the efficiency of information retrieval systems, as well as the growing development of the nuclear medicine field and its concepts, and the need for integrated and coherent organization and precise definition of relationships between these concepts, the present study was aimed at representing terms and concepts and designing the structure of the nuclear medicine field by implementing an ontology in this field. Methods: The field analysis method was employed in this study. The required data were gathered from the information resources published in Iran in the field of nuclear medicine indexed in the International Nuclear Information System (INIS) repository from 1985 to 2019. The seven-step method of Noy and McGuinnes was used to construct the ontology, and the Na and Neo knowledge engineering approach was employed to extract the semantic relationships between the concepts. Results: The nuclear medicine ontology included 224 concepts, 1584 axioms, 463 conceptual pairs, 926 object properties, and 817 annotative properties derived from the related information resources indexed in the INIS repository. The existing relationships between the conceptual pairs were refined and enriched and described in terms of object and annotative properties. Conclusion: Nuclear medicine ontology is an effective tool for knowledge representation in the field of nuclear medicine. The method used to extract the concepts of the field and enrich the relationships between the concepts could be the basis for enriching the relations of the INIS thesaurus and creating a basic ontology in the nuclear field.

Keywords

• biomedical ontologies
• nuclear medicine
• information systems