Home > BCIG Events > Event List > September 2003
Anatomical Pathology Ontologies and Data Mining3:00 pm September 18, 2003
Clinical Center (Building 10) Medical Board Room (Room 2C116) Pathology studies the etiology and pathogenesis of disease. The aggregate of pathology diagnoses in computerized form contains information regarding almost every serious human disease. Data-mining programs should incorporate constraints of routine medical practice, which avoids data collection that is unnecessary, uneconomic, technically unfeasible, or unethical. This report proposes a theory of clinicopathologic inference based upon set theory and modal logic. There is a set of true/false atomic statements (atomset, A), each of which is either a datum (complaints, history, laboratory values, consents); or a medical entity (cancer, inflammation, necrosis). No datum is an entity and no entity is a datum. To each atom, a in set A, there exists known-to-the-k-a, $ka; and to each datum, d in set D, there exists need-to-know-d, #d, and try-to-know-d, !d. A datum is d-Hippocratic (do-no-harm) if (not-#d implies not-!d); and d-conative (try) if ((not-$d and #d) implies !d). An entity may be k-vexative (worrisome) or k-ontologic (exists), in a particular patient. The theory is mathematically consistent, and satisfies Occam's Razor (no entities without data). A computer algorithm concludes within polynomial time. The theory is completely general, and permits broad definitions of patient injury (morbidity, inconvenience, financial constraints, loss-of-privacy); and need-to-know that may differ among observers (patient, physician, insurer, national health policy). This theory can serve to organize medical knowledge, and improve the effectiveness of surveillance in medical systems
G. William Moore, M.D., Ph.D.
G. William Moore, MD, PhD, is a staff pathologist at the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center, with academic appointments in the Departments of Pathology of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and University of Maryland School of Medicine. Dr. Moore completed his Bachelor of Science at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI, in 1967; he was awarded a PhD in Biomathematics from North Carolina State University at Raleigh, NC, in 1971; and an MD from Wayne State University School of Medicine, Detroit, MI, in 1976. Dr. Moore completed a residency in Anatomic Pathology at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1981.
Dr. Moore has had a lifelong interest in mathematical models of disease processes, which over the past decade has become known as "pathology informatics". Dr. Moore has published over 180 articles in peer-reviewed journals in this and related areas. A selection of articles and websites (eposters) is attached.
Dr. Moore is the administrator of The Johns Hopkins Autopsy Resource (JHAR), an Internet website, founded as an institutional database in 1980, and posted publicly in 1995. The JHAR lists over 50,000 autopsy summaries, on patients born over a span of two centuries, and corresponds to an estimated one million tissue blocks, which may be obtained as part of collaborative research investigations. Over 1300 publications in scholarly journals have resulted from the cases listed in the JHAR, and all citations, many with PubMed hyperlinks, are available on the website. Dr. Moore also cooperates with the Goethe University Autopsy Register, a parallel resource at the Goethe University School of Medicine, Frankfurt, Germany.
Dr. Moore has become interested in technical and ethical issues that arise in a public database of human medical records, including records of deceased persons. Many autopsy diagnoses are highly specific, and could affect the social standing, employability, or insurability of living descendants, beyond the legal limits of disclosure. On the one hand, the identity of patients in a database must be scrupulously protected; on the other hand, the integrity of data should not be so compromised as to limit their scientific value. Even properly-encrypted patient identifiers, such as social security number, date of birth, exact address, etc., cannot protect a patient with distinctive medical stigmata that might otherwise identify the patient. Dr. Moore's work is currently focused upon this borderland between medical privacy, encryption, data mining, and medical ontologies, the subject of his presentation.
Related Links
G. WILLIAM MOORE, MD, PhD.
LINKS TO SELECTED PUBLICATIONS1. Moore GW, Goodman M.
A set theoretical approach to immunotaxonomy: Analysis of species comparisons in modified Ouchterlony plates.
Bull Math Biophys. 1968 Jun;30(2):279-289.
2. Moore GW, Hutchins GM, Bulkley BH.
Certainty levels in the nullity method of symbolic logic: application to the pathogenesis of congenital heart malformations.
J Theor Biol. 1979 Jan 7;76(1):53-81.
3. Moore GW, Hutchins GM.
Effort and demand logic in medical decision making.
Metamedicine. 1:277-304, 1980.
4. Moore GW, Hutchins GM.
A Hintikka possible worlds model for certainty levels in medical decision making.
Synthese. 48:87-119, 1981.
5. Moore GW, Hutchins GM.
Symbolic logic analysis of congenital heart disease.
Pathol Res Pract. 1981 Mar;171(1):59-85.
6. Moore GW, Hutchins GM.
Consistency versus completeness in medical decision-making: Exemplar of 155 patients autopsied after coronary artery bypass graft surgery.
Med Inform (Lond). 1983 Jul-Sep;8(3):197-207.
7. O'Rahilly R, Mueller F, Hutchins GM, Moore GW.
Computer ranking of the sequence of appearance of 100 features of the brain and related structures in staged human embryos during the first 5 weeks of development.
Am J Anat. 1984 Nov;171(3):243-257.
8. Moore GW, Hutchins GM, Miller RE.
Token swap test of significance for serial medical data bases.
Am J Med. 1986 Feb;80(2):182-190.
9. Moore GW, Wakai I, Satomura Y, Giere W.
TRANSOFT: Medical translation expert system.
Artif Intell Med 1:149-157, 1989.
10. Berman JJ, Moore GW.
The role of cell death in the growth of preneoplastic lesions: a Monte Carlo simulation model.
Cell Prolif. 1992 Nov;25(6):549-557.
11. Moore GW, Berman JJ, Hanzlick RL, Buchino JJ, Hutchins GM.
A prototype Internet autopsy database. 1625 consecutive fetal and neonatal autopsy facesheets spanning 20 years.
Arch Pathol Lab Med. 1996 Aug;120(8):782-785.
12. Berman JJ, Moore GW, Donnelly WH, Massey, JK, Craig B.
SNOMED Analysis of 40,124 Surgical Pathology Cases.
Am J Clin Pathol 102:539-540, 1994
13. Moore GW, Berman JJ.
Performance analysis of manual and automated systematized nomenclature of medicine (SNOMED) coding.
Am J Clin Pathol. 1994 Mar;101(3):253-256.
14. Moore GW, Berman JJ.
Anatomic Pathology Data Mining.
Chapter 4. In: Cios KJ. Medical Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. Berlin: Springer Verlag. 2000;4:61-107. ISBN: 3-7908-1340-0, 502 pages. Published within the series: "Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing", Physica-Verlag Heidelberg, a Springer-Verlag Company.
