The use of the medical ontology for a semantic-based fusion system in biomedical informatics Application to Alzheimer disease

The unified medical language system (UMLS) offers the possibility to use annotated medical terms for computer aided diagnoses system (CADS). We present a new semantic fusion system, based on UMLS. This fusion system has applications on a CADS that diagnoses neurodegenerative diseases. Since the UMLS Metathesaurus contains a huge amount of data, classification and extraction of the data we use is necessary. For this purpose, we use a feedforward neural network which is capable of training the negative patterns as well as the positive ones. At the semantic level we generate a three-layered network structure, which gives us the possibility of adding medical knowledge in order to cluster the data and prepare it for the fusion process.