An ontological representation and analysis of patientreported and clinical outcomes for multiple sclerosis

We have developed the Multiple Sclerosis Patient Data Ontology (MSPD) to represent data from the patient data registry of the New York State Multiple Sclerosis Consortium (NYSMSC). MSPD is an application ontology that provides a set of classes for the annotation of both clinical measures and patient reported outcome data obtained from the enrollment forms used by the NYSMSC. To do so, we have adopted the paradigm established for representing assays in the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations. Our goal is to compare patient reported outcomes, such as self-reported disability and quality of life perceptions, to objective outcome measures in clinical practice, with reference to diagnoses and treatment modalities. We have begun an ontology-driven retrospective analysis of the patient records in the NYSMSC registry using an ontology term enrichment method in order to spot significant patterns in patient-reported and clinical outcomes in subsets of patients in the NYSMSC patient registry as compared to the NYSMSC patient population as a whole.