Clinical Practice Ontology Automatic Learning from SOAP Reports

Abstract

We show how we implemented an end-to-end process to automatically develop a clinical practice knowledge base acquiring from SOAP notes. With our contribution we intend to overcome the “Knowledge Acquisition Bottleneck” problem by jump-starting the knowledge gathering from the most widely available source of clinical information that are natural language reports. We present the different phases of our process to populate automatically a proposed ontology with clinical assertions extracted from daily routine SOAP notes. The enriched ontology becomes a reasoning able knowledge base that depicts accurately and realistically the clinical practice represented by the source reports. With this knowledge structure in place and novel state-of-the-art reasoning capabilities, based in consequence driven reasoners, a clinical QA system based in controlled natural language is introduced that reveals breakthrough possibilities regarding the applicability of Artificial Intelligence techniques to the medical field.