Ontologies and Bayesian Networks in MedicalDiagnosis

Abstract - The amount of information that must be taken into ac- count in medical diagnosis is huge and subject to evolution. Ontologies are a means for formalizing the concepts of the domain of interest. Open, interoperable ontologies already exist for the biomedical field, enabling scientists to commu- nicate with minimum ambiguity. Unfortunately, reasoners acting upon ontologies operate in a deterministic manner, which is unsuitable for the medical domain, where uncer- tainty must also be taken into account. Bayesian networks (BNs) offer a coherent and intuitive representation of uncer- tain domain knowledge. This paper presents an approach to the use of ontologies and BNs in medical diagnosis. The ap- proach is based on the adoption of predefined structures for the BNs. These lead to reduced extensions to the domain ontology, yet allowing probabilistic analysis.