An ontological framework for representing and exploiting medical knowledge

Abstract Patients on Intensive Care Units (ICUs) need continuous attention and monitoring. The patient may be connected to an alarm system, so that an alarm is triggered when the state of the patient changes. In this work, we present an ontology-based approach to reduce the influence of superfluous alarms. Our main goal was to build an intelligent system for ICUs, so that given a set of patient's event, that system could check whether the patient meets some diagnostic hypothesis in order to keep track of his/her correct evolution.