The benefits of an ontological patient model in clinical decision-support
Austin M., Kelly M., Brady M.
We have developed an application, MDTSuite, designed to support complex group decision making under difficult conditions including time pressure, incomplete information, changing group members and ever expanding guidelines. Taking the colorectal cancer MDT (Multi-Disciplinary-Team) meetings at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford as our test case, we have been trialling the software live in the hospital providing decision support for clinicians discussing real patients. MDTSuite is an application integrating an ontological data model with an argumentation-based decision-support system, showing how the combination of leading technologies OWL (McGuinness & Harmelen 2004), SPARQL (Perez, Arenas, & Gutierrez 2006) and Jena (Carroll et al. 2003) can be used to achieve this. Copyright © 2008.