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A UMLS-based Knowledge Acquisition Tool for Rule-based Clinical Decision Support System Development

Affiliations of the authors: Department of Hospital Information, Henri Mondor Hospital, Créteil, France (SLA, CR, PB, EL); National Institute of Health and Medical Research, Grenoble, France (MD).

Correspondence and reprints: Soumeya Achour, MS, DVM, Département d'Information Hospitalier, C.H.U. Henri Mondor, 51 Avenue du Maréchal de Lattre de Tassigny, F-94019 Créteil, France; e-mail: <soumeya.achour{at}hmn.ap-hop-paris.fr>.

Received for publication: 07/13/00; accepted for publication: 03/14/01.

Decision support systems in the medical field have to be easily modified by medical experts themselves. The authors have designed a knowledge acquisition tool to facilitate the creation and maintenance of a knowledge base by the domain expert and its sharing and reuse by other institutions. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) contains the domain entities and constitutes the relations repository from which the expert builds, through a specific browser, the explicit domain ontology. The expert is then guided in creating the knowledge base according to the pre-established domain ontology and condition–action rule templates that are well adapted to several clinical decision-making processes. Corresponding medical logic modules are eventually generated. The application of this knowledge acquisition tool to the construction of a decision support system in blood transfusion demonstrates the value of such a pragmatic methodology for the design of rule-based clinical systems that rely on the highly progressive knowledge embedded in hospital information systems.