Analyzing Differences in Operational Disease Definitions Using Ontological Modeling

In medicine, there are many diseases which cannot be precisely characterized but are considered as natural kinds. In the communication between health care professionals, this is generally not problematic. In biomedical research, however, crisp definitions are required to unambiguously distinguish patients with and without the disease. In practice, this results in different operational definitions being in use for a single disease. This paper presents an approach to compare different operational definitions of a single disease using ontological modeling. The approach is illustrated with a case-study in the area of severe sepsis.