An architecture for the semantic enhancement of clinical decision support systems

Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) are useful tools that aid physicians during different tasks such as diagnosis, treatment and patient monitoring. Multidisciplinary, heterogeneous and disperse clinical information and decision criteria have to be handled by CDSSs. For such tasks, Knowledge Engineering (KE) techniques and semantic technologies are very suitable, as they support (i) the integration of heterogeneous knowledge, (ii) the expression of rich and well-defined models for knowledge aggregation, and (iii) the application of logic reasoning for the generation of new knowledge. In this paper we propose a generic architecture of a CDSS based on semantic technologies, which also considers the reutilization and enhancement of former CDSS in an organization. Particularly, an implementation of the proposed architecture is also presented, aiming to support the early diagnosis of AD.