Transitive closure of subsumption and causal relations in a large ontology of radiological diagnosis

[Display omitted] •Transitive closure was applied to an ontology’s subsumption and causal relations.•We identified causal assertions that erroneously assumed an organ-specific context.•Transitive closure found site-specific disorders asserted incorrectly as subclasses.•Transitive closure helped identify incorrect assertions, and guide ontology revision. The Radiology Gamuts Ontology (RGO)—an ontology of diseases, interventions, and imaging findings—was developed to aid in decision support, education, and translational research in diagnostic radiology. The ontology defines a subsumption (is_a) relation between more general and more specific terms, and a causal relation (may_cause) to express the relationship between disorders and their possible imaging manifestations. RGO incorporated 19,745 terms with their synonyms and abbreviations, 1768 subsumption relations, and 55,558 causal relations. Transitive closure was computed iteratively; it yielded 2154 relations over subsumption and 1,594,896 relations over causality. Five causal cycles were discovered, all with path length of no more than 5. The graph-theoretic metrics of in-degree and out-degree were explored; the most useful metric to prioritize modification of the ontology was found to be the product of the in-degree of transitive closure over subsumption and the out-degree of transitive closure over causality. Two general types of error were identified: (1) causal assertions that used overly general terms because they implicitly assumed an organ-specific context and (2) subsumption relations where a site-specific disorder was asserted to be a subclass of the general disorder. Transitive closure helped identify incorrect assertions, prioritized and guided ontology revision, and aided resources that applied the ontology’s knowledge.