Interoperable Knowledge Representation in Clinical Decision Support Systems for Rehabilitation

International standards and standard proposals of nomenclatures, ontologies and information models exist in medicine, but the scope of most of them is overly general to cope with the specificities that characterize rehabilitation. Here we carry out an ontology-based exploration of the concepts and relationships in the rehabilitation domain, integrating clinical practice, the clinical investigator record ontology and international standards. The aim of the analysis is to identify potential logical problems with the use of existing models and international standards in representing and reasoning with real clinical data, and to understand whether and how these data might be defined more formally than in the current practice. Our analysis of the relationships among rehabilitation concepts revealed issues related to confusion among classes and their properties, incorrect classifications, overlaps and loss of information. It also suggested properties that should be included in a formal model suitable to be used by decision support