Two DL-based methods for auditing medical terminological systems

Medical terminological systems (TSs) play an increasingly important role in health care by supporting recording, retrieval and analysis of patient information. As the size and complexity of TSs are growing, the need arises for means to audit them, i.e. verify and maintain (logical) consistency and (semantic) correctness of their contents. In this paper we describe two methods based on description logics (DLs) for the audit of TSs. One method uses non-primitive definitions to detect concepts with equivalent definitions. The other method is characterized by stringent assumptions that are made about concept definitions, in order to detect inconsistent definitions. We discuss the possibility of applying these methods to the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) to demonstrate the potentials and pitfalls of these methods. We show that the methods are complementary, and can indeed improve the contents of medical TSs.