Semantic Common Data Model
This repository contains the ontologies that conforms the Semantic Common Data Model, ready to be extended to represent any biomedical knowledge.
The focus concept of the information model is the ClinicalStatement class, which is specialised by specific subclasses that represent documented medical facts (ClinicalProcedureStatement, ClinicalSituationStatement, ObservationResultStatement). Other classes as the one representing the subject (InformationAboutSubjectOfInformation****) and the provider of information (InformationAboutProviderOfInformation) or the HealthcareProcess class provides context to the documented medical facts. The next figure depicts the UML diagram of the current model:
The proposed ontology infrastructure follows the semantic harmonization principles from Cunningham et al. It uses the axiomatically rich top-level ontology BTL2 as reference harmonization framework to allow the unambiguous integration of domain-specific knowledge. The proposed model is agnostic to existing clinical data modelling specifications and includes both information (e.g. temporal context, provenance, etc.) and clinical domain concepts (e.g. 'stroke', 'obesity', etc.).
Next, we show an example of a ClinicalSituationStatement representing the gender of a patient by using the SNOMED CT vocabulary. In blue on the left the main classes of the SCDM appear (ClinicalProcess, ClinicalSituationStatement, and Patient), which have been extended with the SNOMED CT vocabulary (84100007 | History taking (procedure) |, 363787002 | Observable entity (observable entity) |). On the right, the instantiation of the data by using the vocabulary provided by the model is shown:
On the other hand, the next figure depicts an example of ObservationResultStatement. In this case, we are representing the participation of a patient in the procedure FM_ES_EXT_1, which measures the range of elbow extension, and whose result is a numerical value (2 in this case).
This model has been used in the Precise4Q project. More information on this is shown in the use_case folder