OBESTDD: Ontology Based Expert System for Thyroid Disease Diagnosis

This study presents a new approach in developing an ontology based expert system to diagnose thyroid diseases. Ontology represents explicit specification of knowledge in a specific domain of interest in the form of concepts and relations among them. Its merit is that the represented knowledge is both computer and human readable. The adoption of ontology in healthcare has facilitated domain experts and non-experts to perform knowledge representation tasks with great ease. This paper presents an ontology describing the domain of thyroid diseases and its symptoms. The thyroid gland is one of the most important organs in the body since it is responsible for controlling metabolism. Thyroid disease can be difficult to diagnose because symptoms are easily confused with other conditions. This study proposes at diagnosing thyroid diseases with an ontology based expert system called as OBESTDD (Ontology Based Expert System for Thyroid Disease Diagnosis). It uses ontology to model the contents of domain knowledge and rules to infer the related diagnosis.