Abstract

Research in medicine has shown that comorbidity is prevalent among chronic diseases. In ophthalmology, it is used to refer to the overlap of two or more ophthalmic disorders. The comorbidity of cataract and glaucoma has continued to gain increasing prominence in ophthalmology within the past few decades and poses a major concern to practitioners. The situation is made worse by the dearth in number of ophthalmologists in Nigeria vis-à-vis Sub-Saharan Africa, making it most inevitable that patients will find themselves more at the mercies of General Practitioners (GPs) who are not experts in this domain of interest. To stem the tide, we designed a framework that adopts a knowledge-based Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) approach to deal with predicting ophthalmic comorbidity as well as the generation of patient-specific care plans at the point of care. This research which is within the domain of medical/healthcare informatics was carried out through an in-depth understanding of the intricacies associated with knowledge representation/preprocessing of relevant domain knowledge. Furthermore, we present the Comorbidity Ontological Framework for Intelligent Prediction (COFIP) in which Artificial Neural Network and Decision Trees, both being mechanisms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) was embedded into the framework to give it an intelligent (predictive and adaptive) capability. This framework provides the platform for a CDSS that is diagnostic, predictive and preventive. This is because the framework was designed to predict with satisfactory accuracy, the tendency of a patient with either of cataract or glaucoma to degenerate into a state comorbidity. Furthermore, because this framework is generic in outlook, it can be adapted for other chronic diseases of interest within the medical informatics research community.