Open Biomedical Ontologies Applied to Prostate Cancer

Abstract

This paper surveys preliminary results from the Interdisciplinary Prostate Ontology Project (IPOP), in which ontologies from the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library have been used to annotate clinical reports about prostate cancer. First we discuss why we rejected several controlled vocabularies, including SNOMED, DICOM, and RadLex, preferring instead to use the OBO library. We then briefly describe the database-backed website we have created around the relevant OBO ontologies, and provide excerpts of reports from radiology, surgery, and pathology which we have hyperlinked to the ontology terms. This method allows us to discover which relevant terms exist in the OBO library, and which do not. The final section of this paper discusses these gaps in the OBO library and considers methods of filling them.