Automatic diagnosis of COVID-19 infection based on ontology reasoning

BACKGROUND: 2019-nCoV has been spreading around the world and becoming a global concern. To prevent further widespread of 2019-nCoV, confirmed and suspected cases of COVID-19 infection are suggested to be kept in quarantine. However, the diagnose of COVID-19 infection is quite time-consuming and labor-intensive. To alleviate the burden on the medical staff, we have done some research on the intelligent diagnosis of COVID-19. METHODS: In this paper, we constructed a COVID-19 Diagnosis Ontology (CDO) by utilizing Protégé, which includes the basic knowledge graph of COVID-19 as well as diagnostic rules translated from Chinese government documents. Besides, SWRL rules were added into the ontology to infer intimate relationships between people, thus facilitating the efficient diagnosis of the suspected cases of COVID-19 infection. We downloaded real-case data and extracted patients’ syndromes from the descriptive text, so as to verify the accuracy of this experiment. RESULTS: After importing those real instances into Protégé, we demonstrated that the COVID-19 Diagnosis Ontology showed good performances to diagnose cases of COVID-19 infection automatically. CONCLUSIONS: In conclusion, the COVID-19 Diagnosis Ontology will not only significantly reduce the manual input in the diagnosis process of COVID-19, but also uncover hidden cases and help prevent the widespread of this epidemic.