HOP Faculty Member Writes Two Papers for the International Conference on Biomedical Ontology

William Hogan, M.D., M.S, professor in the Department of Health Outcomes & Policy, co-authored two papers that were presented at the 2015 International Conference on Biomedical Ontology in Lisbon, Portugal, on July 27-30.

Hogan presented the first paper, “An Ontological Analysis of Diagnostic Assertions in Electronic Healthcare Records,” which analyzes two sets of Referent Tracking Tuples (RTT) that illustrate problems in constructing cases from electronic health care record data that are completely accurate based on what is (and has been) the case in reality. You can read the full paper, which was coauthored by Werner Ceusters, M.D., director of the research ontology group at the University at Buffalo, here.

The second paper, “An Accurate and Precise Representation of Drug Ingredients,” updates the Drug Ontology (DrOn), which is a pharmaceutical database of drugs and their ingredients, as well as their mechanisms of action and therapeutic indications. The update of DrOn included representation of active ingredients and their strengths as well as excipients, which are inactive ingredients that aid in the manufacturing process, identification, or delivery of the drug. The paper was co-authored by Jiang Bian, Ph.D., assistant professor in Department of Health outcomes & Policy and Josh Hanna, IT Senior in the Department of Health Outcomes & Policy, who presented it at the conference. You can read the full paper here or access DrOn here.