An Ontological Model for Urinary Profiles

Urinalysis is the test of urine, which, identifying presence of particles and substances in the sample can provide valuable information about patient´s urinary and renal condition as well as about major metabolic functions. Even though being a quick, accurate and cost-effective test, it has not received proper attention, preventing it to achieve its whole power. Capability to identify the main urinary particles and arrange urinary findings in a clinical context are among the requirements to change this scenario. Since these are chiefly informational tasks, they seem to be liable to computational representation. This way, this work presents an ontological model to represent urinary profiles in order to allow such arrange of findings and help to predict contents to be searched in the sample. It is based on an ontological analysis of the problem and formalized according to the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). The paper also brings an implementation of such model to deal with the case of nephritic profile. It is implemented using OWL 2 and allows important inference through simple DL queries. Besides dealing with urinary profiles, the proposed model may also give insight on how to deal with correlate domains (e.g. blood or liquor tests) and may be generalized to similar situations in different scopes (e.g. employee profiling).