The nodes focusing tool for clinical course data of hypergraph structure in the ontological framework CSX output from...

Knowledge management is one of the significant issues in this century. In medical informatics, the concept of ontology is an important current topic. In addition, there is great interest in knowledge acquisition from clinical data. When doctors use clinical information systems (CIS), their operation implicitly represents, to some extent, their thinking processes with clear reasons and goals according to their intent. If we can capture such resources in an appropriate representation, considerable empirical knowledge could be utilized in various research fields. With this prospect, the authors built an experimental CIS and a nodes-focusing tool for abstracting a summary of the clinical course being examined. The information model is based on a thinking process model, and data are represented in the ontological framework CSX. Then we showed the knowledge-abstracting procedures with this tool. Some domain experts and intern students showed great interest. The authors thereby concluded that such an empirical knowledge acquisition environment is useful for research, education, and so on.