Pavandeep Kataria

Implementation of Ontology for Intelligent Hospital Wards

We have developed and implemented an ontology for an intelligent hospital ward. Our aim is to address the pervasiveness of computing applications in healthcare environments, which require: sharing of data across the hospital, including data generated by sensors and embedded in such environments, and dealing with semantic heterogeneity that exists across the hospitals data repositories. Our conceptual ontological model that supports such an environment has been implemented using semantic Web tools and tested through the application developed with the J2EE technology.

Sharing information and data across heterogeneous e-health systems

Information and data sharing across heterogeneous e-health systems, focusing on the management of patient care, have become the backbone of modern delivery of sustainable telemedicine services. Information and data available to healthcare practitioners in such environments range from patients medical records, stored in repositories at places where patients have been treated, to a variety of information related to medical research, pharmaceutical products, or information stored within social networks of healthcare interest groups. This study sought to demonstrate two different approaches enabling the sharing of information/data across heterogeneous e-health systems: (1) Context-Aware Data Retrieval Architecture (CADRA), which secures the extraction and presentation of e-health information to users in requested format, and (2) Generic Ontology for Context Aware, Interoperable, and Data Sharing (Go-CID) software applications, which secure semantic interoperation across heterogeneous e-health data sources. Proof-of-concept was demonstrated in both cases, CADRA and Go-CID, to achieve understanding and building of knowledge about e-health environments. This study invites practical solutions for interoperable e-health systems.

Sharing e-Health Information through Ontological Layering

e-Health information, including patient clinical and demographic data, is very often dispersed across various environments, which either generate them or retrieve them from different sources. Healthcare professionals often need related e-health information in order to obtain a more comprehensive picture of a patients health status. There are many obstacles to retrieving information and data from heterogeneous sources. In this paper we show that our ontological layering helps in (a) classifying requests imposed by healthcare professionals when retrieving e-health information from heterogeneous sources and (b) resolving semantic heterogeneities across repositories and composing an adequate answer to issued requests. We use a layered software architectural model based on Generic ontology for Context-aware, Interoperable and Data sharing (Go- CID) software applications, applicable to e-Health environments. Ontological layering and reasoning have been demonstrated with semantic web technologies.

Ontological support for managing non-functional requirements in pervasive healthcare

We designed and implemented an ontological solution which makes provisions for choosing adequate devices/sensors for remote monitoring of patients who are suffering from post-stroke health complications. We argue that non-functional requirements in pervasive healthcare systems can be elicited and managed through semantics stored in ontological models and reasoning performed on them. Our contribution is twofold: (i) we enrich the elicitation and specification of non-functional requirements within the requirements engineering discipline and (ii) we address the pervasiveness of healthcare software systems through the way of choosing devices embedded in them, and through user expectations in terms of having access to pervasive services personalized to their needs.

SHARING HEALTHCARE DATA BY MANIPULATING ONTOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALS

The purpose of this chapter is twofold: A) We primarily want to disseminate our experiences of using the power of ontological engineering when dealing with interoperability and the problem of data sharing in heterogeneous computational environments in healthcare. B) At the same time we illustrate the complexity of the manipulation of ontological concepts in order to achieve A) above, by giving a detailed description of the steps involved in the process of delivering data sharing.

SEMANTIC MANAGEMENT OF THE SUBMISSION PROCESS FOR MEDICINAL PRODUCTS AUTHORIZATION

The pharmaceutical corporations are confronting big challenges when applying for Marketing Authorization (MA) licenses in extremely restricted environments, which are built around a variety of regulations, legislations and regulatory requirements. For novel pharmaceutical products, companies are required to submit thousands of pages of documents as part of the regulatory review process, which very often restricts companies’ and governments’ initiatives to speed up ‘time-to-market’ for medicines and minimize costs of the whole process. Furthermore, pharmaceutical companies are supposed to submit their Marketing Authorization Applications (MAA) according to their national specifications. Thus the formatting and organization of MA submission documents are dictated by the regulatory requirements of each country. Hence, pharmaceutical companies had to reformat and adjust the contents of MAA if they were applying for MA licenses across the world.