Publications by authors named "Maria Del Carmen Legaz-Garcia"

Liver transplantation is the only curative treatment option in patients diagnosed with end-stage liver disease. The low availability of organs demands an accurate selection procedure based on histological analysis, in order to evaluate the allograft. This assessment, traditionally carried out by a pathologist, is not exempt from subjectivity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background And Objective: Effective sharing and reuse of Electronic Health Records (EHR) requires technological solutions which deal with different representations and different models of data. This includes information models, domain models and, ideally, inference models, which enable clinical decision support based on a knowledge base and facts. Our goal is to develop a framework to support EHR interoperability based on transformation and reasoning services intended for clinical data and knowledge.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third leading cause of cancer mortality worldwide. Different pathological pathways and molecular drivers have been described and some of the associated markers are used to select effective anti-neoplastic therapy. More recent evidence points to a causal role of microbiota and altered microRNA expression in CRC carcinogenesis, but their relationship with pathological drivers or molecular phenotypes is not clearly established.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

ArchMS is a framework that represents clinical information and knowledge using ontologies in OWL, which facilitates semantic interoperability and thereby the exploitation and secondary use of clinical data. However, it does not yet support the automated assessment of quality of care. CLIF is a stepwise method to formalize quality indicators.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The heterogeneity of clinical data is a key problem in the sharing and reuse of Electronic Health Record (EHR) data. We approach this problem through the combined use of EHR standards and semantic web technologies, concretely by means of clinical data transformation applications that convert EHR data in proprietary format, first into clinical information models based on archetypes, and then into RDF/OWL extracts which can be used for automated reasoning. In this paper we describe a proof-of-concept platform to facilitate the (re)configuration of such clinical data transformation applications.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Computational comparative analysis of multiple genomes provides valuable opportunities to biomedical research. In particular, orthology analysis can play a central role in comparative genomics; it guides establishing evolutionary relations among genes of organisms and allows functional inference of gene products. However, the wide variations in current orthology databases necessitate the research toward the shareability of the content that is generated by different tools and stored in different structures.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Biomedical research usually requires combining large volumes of data from multiple heterogeneous sources, which makes difficult the integrated exploitation of such data. The Semantic Web paradigm offers a natural technological space for data integration and exploitation by generating content readable by machines. Linked Open Data is a Semantic Web initiative that promotes the publication and sharing of data in machine readable semantic formats.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Biomedical research usually requires combining large volumes of data from multiple heterogeneous sources. Such heterogeneity makes difficult not only the generation of research-oriented dataset but also its exploitation. In recent years, the Open Data paradigm has proposed new ways for making data available in ways that sharing and integration are facilitated.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: The semantic interoperability of electronic healthcare records (EHRs) systems is a major challenge in the medical informatics area. International initiatives pursue the use of semantically interoperable clinical models, and ontologies have frequently been used in semantic interoperability efforts. The objective of this paper is to propose a generic, ontology-based, flexible approach for supporting the automatic transformation of clinical models, which is illustrated for the transformation of Clinical Element Models (CEMs) into openEHR archetypes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The semantic interoperability of clinical information requires methods able to transform heterogeneous data sources from both technological and structural perspectives, into representations that facilitate the sharing of meaning. The SemanticHealthNet (SHN) project proposes using semantic content patterns for representing clinical information based on a model of meaning, preventing users from a deep knowledge on ontology and description logics formalism. In this work we propose a flexible transformation method that uses semantic content patterns to guide the mapping between the source data and a target domain ontology.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The secondary use of electronic healthcare records (EHRs) often requires the identification of patient cohorts. In this context, an important problem is the heterogeneity of clinical data sources, which can be overcome with the combined use of standardized information models, virtual health records, and semantic technologies, since each of them contributes to solving aspects related to the semantic interoperability of EHR data.

Objective: To develop methods allowing for a direct use of EHR data for the identification of patient cohorts leveraging current EHR standards and semantic web technologies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Genome sequencing projects generate vast amounts of data of a wide variety of types and complexities, and at a growing pace. Traditionally, the annotation of such sequences was difficult to share with other researchers. Despite the fact that this has improved with the development and application of biological ontologies, such annotation efforts remain isolated since the amount of information that can be used from other annotation projects is limited.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Linking Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) content to educational materials has been considered a key international recommendation to enable clinical engagement and to promote patient safety. This would suggest citizens to access reliable information available on the web and to guide them properly. In this paper, we describe an approach in that direction, based on the use of dual model EHR standards and standardized educational contents.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF