Extended Clinical Discourse Representation Structure for Controlled Natural Language Clinical Decision Support Systems

Abstract

To support an end to end Question and Answering system to help the clinical practitioners in a cardiovascular healthcare environment, an extended discourse representation structure CIDERS is introduced. This extension of the well-known DRT (Discourse Representation Theory) structures, go beyond single text representation extending them to embrace the general clinical history of a given patient. Introduced is a proposed and developed ontology framework, Ontology for General Clinical Practice, enhancing the currently available state-of-the-art ontologies for medical science and for the cardiovascular specialty, It's shown the scientific and philosophical reasons of its present dual structure with a deeply expressive (SHOIN) terminological base (TBox) and a highly computable (EL++) assertions knowledge base (ABox).