Talk on 'Breast Cancer Ontology' by Andrei Coronel

Photo Caption: Mr. Andrei Coronel, faculty member of the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science, Ateneo de Manila University, and Ph.D. Computer Science student of Dr. Rafael Saldaña gives a special talk on "Breast Cancer Ontology."

WHAT: Talk on the Multi-media Medical Web Project (MMedWeb) in Singapore and Breast Cancer Ontology

WHEN: Thursday, August 7, 2008

TIME: 4:30 - 5:30 p.m.

VENUE: Room SEC 303A, Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City

SPEAKER: MR. ANDREI CORONEL


About the Speaker:

ANDREI CORONEL is a faculty member of the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science (DISCS) of Ateneo de Manila University. He holds a Master's degree in computer science and is now pursuing his Ph.D. in Computer Science under the mentorship of Dr. Rafael Saldaña. Andrei has recently arrived from Singapore where he did research work for three months at the National University of Singapore under the auspices of the ONCO-MEDIA (http://www.onco-media.com) Project.

ABSTRACT:

Andrei's talk will have two parts. The first part will focus on Andrei's involvement in the Multi-Media Medical Web (MMedWeb) Project of the National University of Singapore.

The second part will focus on his Ph.D. research proposal (in progress) and the ideas that he gathered while in Singapore on the subject of breast cancer ontology.

PART 1:

OVERVIEW OF COLLABORATIVE EFFORTS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE-MEDICAL RESEARCH IN SINGAPORE

In this first part, the efforts of I2R (Institute for Infocomm Technology) together with the NUH (National University Hospital) , both institutions within NUS (National University of Singapore) for developing systems to improve health-care in general will be discussed.
Among the numerous efforts of these institutions, the MMedWeb Project will be given focus. This is one of their several projects; however the focus is directed specifically towards the medical diagnosis and academic research of breast cancer. Both the basics of the hardware and software platform will be discussed.

PART 2: (PhD proposal in progress): Modification Techniques for Breast Cancer Ontology
(tentative title)

An ontology in the context of computer science refers to a complete representation of a body of knowledge. It is usually composed of concepts and the relationships between concepts. There are several ways of representing an ontology for computer programs to interpret and for users to visualize, such as the OWL and RDF formats. In these representations, an ontology may be represented as a hierarchical graph or tree. The augmentation of an ontology by adding concepts and relationships from external ontologies may be then interpreted as a problem of fusing graphs. This research attempts to create techniques for fusing external graphs together to augment a main graph that would work in the context of ontology modification. This would include computational tasks such as checking for conflicts, redundancies, the selection criteria for which concepts and relationships to add, and validation of the fused ontology. For this research, the chosen ontology is cancer ontology, with focus on breast cancer specifically.
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