DEVELOPING CARDIAC ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY ONTOLOGY:MOVING TOWARDS DATA HARMONIZATION AND INTEGRATION

Cardiac electrophysiology (EP) studies the electrical heart conduction system which is used for diagnosis and treatment of cardiac arrhythmias. In this context, a huge amount of data is generated, requiring efficient and effective access, interpretation, and data analysis from multiple sources in aunified view. To resolve this challenge, this paper presents an ontology to reconcile data heterogeneity problems in this domain.

The cardiac EP ontology was constructed according to the life cycle of ontology building. Structural, functional, and expert evaluation was performed to ensure its quality and usability.

Cardiac EP ontology was developed using protégé environment and implemented in OWL editing tool.It presented a detailed hierarchical structure of the cardiac EP domain with around 324 instances describing cardiac EP-related concepts.

Cardiac EP ontology provides an explicit formal description of the concepts, relationships, and properties associated with cardiac electrophysiology making seamlessdata integration between multiple heterogeneous databases. It also is a useful framework for knowledge representation in knowledge-based systems, as well as for explicit communication between experts in the EP domain.