Understanding inflicted injuries in young children: toward an ontology based approach

Investigations of children experiencing inflicted injuries is often initiated once admitted into the emergency department for injuries, and involves understanding the complex interactions between a range of different factors such as health conditions, fracture biomechanics, family history, carer accounts and so on. In this position paper, we propose the use of ontologies for capturing case details of such radiology investigations in order to create an initial knowledge base of retrospective cases, to be further expanded in the future. We discuss how we developed our ELECTRICA (ELEctronic knowledge base for Clinicians, Trainers and Researchers in Child Abuse) ontology and the different components of the ontology. We are currently using this ontology to create a knowledge base, to be used as a vision demonstrator to access larger datasets. In the longer term, we would like to use the knowledge base to support clinicians and radiologists in making decisions on current cases by offering a mechanism for searching historical cases, identifying similar cases and offering insights on risk factors that may have been missed during investigations.