RadiO: a prototype application ontology for radiology reporting tasks.

We introduce RadiO, a prototype application ontology for the support of electronic radiology reporting. This application ontology is implemented in Protégé and comprises three layers: 1. a radiology report layer, capturing observations made on patient examinations through the use of a controlled vocabulary of the radiographic imaging domain (RadLex), 2. an imaging domain ontology, representing knowledge about image entities and their image features, and 3. a reference ontology for anatomy (Foundational Model of Anatomy), representing canonical anatomical knowledge. The aim of this prototype is to support the identification of image features of image entities and their use in diagnostic interpretations, as well as to provide a basis for structured reporting applications in the domain of medical imaging.