A Cardiac Web Prototype for Semantic Interoperability and Decision Support

Clinical decision support systems can be improved if data exchange among different organizations with full and understandable clinical meaning is achieved. Towards this end, the development of new methodologies of information management is necessary. Among them, CEN/ISO EN13606 (archetypes) is the most promising approach. According to World Health Organization, cardiovascular diseases are the leading causes of death worldwide. A good number of risk indices from electrocardiogram signal processing have been proposed for cardiovascular risk stratification. We have considered here the Heart Rate Turbulence (HRT) due to its clear and concise guidelines. Based on previously built HRT ontology and archetype, a web prototype was created to achieve semantic interoperability among heterogeneous hospital systems; and to avoid technical limitations when different commercial tools are used. The web prototype was able to provide the user with the following functionalities: (1) binding the HRT ontology concepts to the HRT archetype nodes by using a designed archetype-ontology binding system; (2) compiling and maintaining database HRT records; and (3) exporting these records, while enabling semantic interoperability to allow data exchange among different systems.