Object-Oriented Healthcare Terminology Repository 

Controlled Medical terminologies (CMT) have been recognized as important tools in variety of medical informatics applications ranging from patient-record systems to decision support systems. CMTs are typically organized in semantic network structures consisting of huge number of concepts. This overwhelming size and complexity can be limitation to their wide-spread utilization and maintenance. 

The Object Oriented Data Base & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory  has performed extensive research in OODB representation of Controlled Medical Terminologies. Whether you are interested in the  research or licensing the technology for commercial use,  you will find necessary information in this OOHTR Project web site. 

Overview

Dictionaries and thesauri are wonderful tools for a person that needs to find out information about a specific term, such as its meaning, synonyms, or its grammatical properties.  However, dictionaries and thesauri fail if a person knows neither a term, nor its synonyms.  In some cases this lack of a term is due to forgetting.  People remember a concept, but they don’t remember the term that describes this concept.  In some cases people feel that “they almost remember it.”  This is called a tip-of-tongue phenomenon. Sometimes, people have a vague idea that a concept with certain properties must exist, but they have too little knowledge in order to say how it should look.  

In medicine we are confronted with these cases of lack of knowledge of a term, as we will explain now.  There is a large and ever increasing number of medical terms, including drugs, diagnosis, procedures, diseases, and organisms.  Thus, even the best doctor cannot know all of those terms. A person that has very little medical knowledge might want to search the World-Wide-Web with reference to a pain he regularly feels in his legs.  Such a person would find that medical literature uses specialized terms for bones, and he is not familiar with the correct term for the bone that he feels a pain in. A researcher might want to find out about the most recent experimental drugs for a certain form of  cancer and he would not know the name of such an experimental drug.

Neither a paper dictionary nor a paper thesaurus will, in general, be sufficient to solve any of the above example problems.  A searchable electronic version of a dictionary with a good conceptual structure would be helpful.  However, it is of utmost importance there are tools available that allow for retrieval of concepts in cases where the exact nature and even existence of a concept are not known to the person performing the search.

Controlled Medical Terminologies (CMTs) is an important tool in a variety of informatics applications and is typically organized in a semantic network of structures. Unlike a "dictionary" view of terminology, the OOHTR is organized around "concepts" such as myocardial infarction - defined as infarction of an area of the heart muscle, not around terms, such as "MI" or "heart attack". Associated with these concepts are their proper names, synonyms, clinical categories, and mappings to the constituent vocabularies. The concepts themselves exist in a large "semantic network" that provides relationships between the terms, such as set contents: myocardial infarction "is-a" heart disease, and location: myocardial infarction "has associated topology" heart.  

This  project is a research on representing the semantic network as an equivalent Object-Oriented Data Base (OODB), called Object-Oriented Healthcare Terminology Repository (OOHTR) This project was started in 1995 and completed in 1999.  Due to the complex nature of this project various third parties were involved at various stages of the project, apart from many NJIT students.  NJIT is exploring the commercialization of tools developed during this research.