Development of ontology for the diseases of spine

KISTI is carrying out an e-Spine project for spinal diseases to prepare for the aged society, so called NAP. The purpose of the study is to build a spine ontology that represents the anatomical structure and disease information which is compatible with Simulation Model of KISTI. The final use of the ontology includes diagnosis of diseases and setting treatment directions and by the clinicians. The ontology was represented using a 3D software. Twenty diseases were selected to be represented after discussions with a spine specialist and two medical imaging specialists. Several ontology studies were reviewed before modeling the ontology. Reference books were selected for each disease by the spine specialist and were organized in MS Excel by a trained nurse. The contents were then reviewed by the specialists. Altova SemanticWorks and Protégé were used to code spine ontology with OWL Full model. Links to the images from KISTI and sample images of diseases were included in the ontology. The OWL ontology was also reviewed by the specialists again with Protégé. We represented uni-directional ontology from anatomical structure to disease, images and treatment. The ontology was human understandable. It would be useful for the education of medical students or residents studying diseases of spine. But in order for the computer to understand the ontology, a new model with OWL DL or Lite is needed.