# Whole-cycle management of women with epilepsy of child-bearing age: ontology construction and application

## TL;DR

This paper introduces an ontology and online system to improve the management of epilepsy in women of child-bearing age through better knowledge sharing among healthcare providers.

## Contribution

The novel contribution is the development and validation of the WWECA ontology and its application in a question-and-answer system for multidisciplinary healthcare teams.

## Key findings

- The WWECA ontology integrated 609 entities with three attributes each, achieving expert consensus through a Delphi process.
- The ontology-driven system received an average rating of 4.2 from 10 experts, indicating its effectiveness and utility.
- The framework shows potential for scalability to manage other complex chronic conditions.

## Abstract

The effective management of epilepsy in women of child-bearing age necessitates a concerted effort from multidisciplinary teams. Nevertheless, there exists an inadequacy in the seamless exchange of knowledge among healthcare providers within this context. Consequently, it is imperative to enhance the availability of informatics resources and the development of decision support tools to address this issue comprehensively.

The development of the Women with Epilepsy of Child-Bearing Age Ontology (WWECA) adhered to established ontology construction principles. The ontology’s scope and universal terminology were initially established by the development team and subsequently subjected to external evaluation through a rapid Delphi consensus exercise involving domain experts. Additional entities and attribute annotation data were sourced from authoritative guideline documents and specialized terminology databases within the respective field. Furthermore, the ontology has played a pivotal role in steering the creation of an online question-and-answer system, which is actively employed and assessed by a diverse group of multidisciplinary healthcare providers.

WWECA successfully integrated a total of 609 entities encompassing various facets related to the diagnosis and medication for women of child-bearing age afflicted with epilepsy. The ontology exhibited a maximum depth of 8 within its hierarchical structure. Each of these entities featured three fundamental attributes, namely Chinese labels, definitions, and synonyms. The evaluation of WWECA involved 35 experts from 10 different hospitals across China, resulting in a favorable consensus among the experts. Furthermore, the ontology-driven online question and answer system underwent evaluation by a panel of 10 experts, including neurologists, obstetricians, and gynecologists. This evaluation yielded an average rating of 4.2, signifying a positive reception and endorsement of the system’s utility and effectiveness.

Our ontology and the associated online question and answer system hold the potential to serve as a scalable assistant for healthcare providers engaged in the management of women with epilepsy (WWE). In the future, this developmental framework has the potential for broader application in the context of long-term management of more intricate chronic health conditions.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12911-024-02509-z.