Dirk Colaert

Semantic patient information aggregation and medicinal decision support

Although the health care sector has already been subjected to a major computerization effort, this effort is often limited to the implementation of standalone systems which do not communicate with each other. Interoperability problems limit health care applications from achieving their full potential. In this paper, we propose the use of Semantic Web technologies to solve interoperability problems between data providers. Through the development of unifying health care ontologies, data from multiple health care providers can be aggregated, which can then be used as input for a decision support system. This way, more data is taken into account than a single health care provider possesses in his local setting. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated by the creation of an end-to-end proof of concept, focusing on Belgian health care providers and medicinal decision support.

Semantic processing of EHR data for clinical research

There is a growing need to semantically process and integrate clinical data from different sources for clinical research. This paper presents an approach to integrate EHRs from heterogeneous resources and generate integrated data in different data formats or semantics to support various clinical research applications. The proposed approach builds semantic data virtualization layers on top of data sources, which generate data in the requested semantics or formats on demand. This approach avoids upfront dumping to and synchronizing of the data with various representations. Data from different EHR systems are first mapped to RDF data with source semantics, and then converted to representations with harmonized domain semantics where domain ontologies and terminologies are used to improve reusability. It is also possible to further convert data to application semantics and store the converted results in clinical research databases, e.g. i2b2, OMOP, to support different clinical research settings. Semantic conversions between different representations are explicitly expressed using N3 rules and executed by an N3 Reasoner (EYE), which can also generate proofs of the conversion processes. The solution presented in this paper has been applied to real-world applications that process large scale EHR data.

Improve treatment of pneumonia and reduce adverse drug events

Adverse drug events ADE occur frequently in both ambulatory and inpatient settings and often lead to hospitalization; these events occur more often in the elderly. ADE may result from medication errors at the medication process or from ADE. In this paper we present a new method to improve treatment of Community-acquired pneumonia. We use database of 86 patients to test and validate this approach.

Intelligent wide-area resistance surveillance: a novel approach using the semantic web

Proper surveillance of infectious diseases poses special challenges to information technology when it comes to data collection, including wide-area, multi-source and trans-border collection and aggregation of infectious disease and drug resistance information. In this project, we present a novel approach to efficiently monitor bacterial resistance data over multiple international clinical entities.