Preliminary Study of Ontological Process Analysis of Surgical Endoscopy

Ontological investigation has been applied to the health care field in several areas, such as disease terminology, medical service, and clinical guidelines. However, few reports have adopted an ontological approach to surgical procedures. This study applies ontological analysis to the procedure of surgical endoscopy. Physician actions during gastrointestinal endoscopy were decomposed and classified from upper-level to sub-class concepts by an ontological approach. Each upper-level concept was then subdivided into further sub-class concepts. In this way, the procedures for gastrointestinal endoscopy were successfully classified within ontological concepts. Ontological analysis and description of surgical procedure can be applied in many areas, including medical education, training, ergonomic evaluation, workflow management, and development of endoscopic robotics and simulators. However, difficulties remain in mapping concurrencies and in repetitive processing. Also, the ontological analysis of some complicated and troublesome procedures should be improved. The need for computer software that provides simple and easy analysis of surgical procedures was made clear in this study.