Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Jul 12, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 3, 2023 - Jul 29, 2023
Date Accepted: May 4, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
D3X: An Ontology to Aggregate and Link Dermoscopic Patterns to Differential Diagnoses
ABSTRACT
Background:
Dermoscopy is a growing field using microscopy to identify skin lesions by dermatologists and primary care physicians. For a given skin lesion, a wide variety of differential diagnoses exist, which may be challenging for inexperienced users to name and understand.
Objective:
In this study, we describe the creation of the Dermoscopy Differential Diagnosis Explorer (D3X), an ontology linking dermoscopic patterns to differential diagnoses.
Methods:
Existing ontologies that were incorporated into D3X include the Elements of Visuals Ontology (EVO) and Dermoscopy Elements of Visuals Ontology (DEVO), which connect visual features to dermoscopic patterns. A list of differential diagnoses for each pattern was generated from the literature and in consultation with domain experts. Open-source images were incorporated from DermNet, Dermoscopedia, and open access research papers.
Results:
D3X was encoded in the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language and includes 3041 logical axioms, 1519 classes, 103 object properties, and 20 data properties. We compared D3X with publicly available ontologies in the dermatology domain using a semiotic theory-driven metric to measure innate qualities of D3X with others. The results indicate that D3X is adequately comparable with other ontologies of the dermatology domain, with some caveats. We also propose a web application based on D3X and describe a relevant use case.
Conclusions:
Dermatology trainees and other medical professionals could use the D3X-powered web application to search for differential diagnoses associated with dermoscopic features/patterns, and vice versa. This represents a promising supplemental tool in dermoscopy education and clinical practice.
Citation
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Copyright
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