Toward clearer recognition and easier usefulness: development of a cross-lingual atherosclerotic cerebrovascular disease ontology

Abstract

Atherosclerotic cerebrovascular disease could result in a great number of deaths and disabilities. However, it did not acquire enough attention. Less information, statistics, or data on the disease has been revealed. Thus, no systematic concept datasets were released to help clinicians clarify the scope, assist research, and offer maximized value. This study aimed to develop a cross-lingual atherosclerotic cerebrovascular disease ontology; describe the workflow, schema, hierarchical structure, and the highlighted content; design a brand-new rehabilitation ontology; implement the ontology evaluation; and illustrate the application scenarios in real-world scenarios. We implemented nine steps based on the Ontology Development 101 methodologies combined with expert opinions. The ontology included collection and specification of clinical requirements, background investigation and knowledge acquisition, ontology selection and reuse, scope identification, schema definition, concept extraction, concept extension, ontology verification, and ontology evaluation. We evaluated the proposed ontology in the literature classification task. The current ontology included 10 top-level classes, respectively, clinical manifestation, comorbidity, complication, diagnosis, model of atherosclerotic cerebrovascular disease, pathogenesis, prevention, rehabilitation, risk factor, and treatment. There are 1715 concepts in the 11-level ontology, covering 4588 Chinese terms, 6617 English terms, and 972 definitions. The ontology could be applied in real-world scenarios such as information retrieval, new expression discovery, named entity recognition, and knowledge fusion, and the use case proved that it could offer satisfying support to related medical scenarios. The ontology was proven to be useful in text classification tasks, and the weight-F1 score could reach >80% combined with the pretrained model. The proposed ontology provided a clear set of cross-lingual concepts and terms with an explicit hierarchical structure, helping scientific researchers to quickly retrieve relevant medical literature, assisting data scientists to efficiently identify relevant contents in electronic health records, and providing a clear domain framework for academic reference. Database URL: https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/ACVD_ONTOLOGY