Fuzzy Ontology for Patient Emergency Department Triage

摘要

Triage in emergency department (ED) is adopted procedure in several countries using different emergency severity index systems. The objective is to subdivide patients into categories of increasing acuity to allow for prioritization and reduce emergency department congestion. However, while several studies have focused on improving the triage system and managing medical resources, the classification of patients depends strongly on nurse's subjective judgment and thus is prone to human errors. So. it is crucial to set up a system able to model, classify and reason about vague, incomplete and uncertain knowledge. Thus, we propose in this paper a novel fuzzy ontology based on a new Fuzzy Emergency Severity Index (F-ESI_2.0) to improve the accuracy of current triage systems. Therefore, we model some fuzzy relevant medical subdomains that influence the patient's condition. Ourapproach is based on continuous structured and unstructured textual data over more than two years collected during patient visits to the ED of the Lille University Hospital Center (LUHC) in France. The resulting fuzzy ontology is able to model uncertain knowledge and organize the patient's passage to the ED by treating the most serious patients first. Evaluation results shows that the resulting fuzzy ontology is a complete domain ontology which can improve current triage system failures.