Quantitative analysis of ontology research articles in the radiologic domain.

To investigate the most advanced ontology research in health care and its impact on the radiologic domain, we proposed a concept identification and abstraction technique called "Concept Step". This technique identifies a MeSH term, medical subject headings used in PubMed, in a sentence and climbs up through its hierarchy to reach an abstract concept. We developed original Java software to implement this technique. We tested it on 2,774 abstracts in health-care ontology research retrieved from MEDLINE on 23 October 2008. The total number of MeSH terms was 112,690. We counted a total of 33 MeSH terms (0.029%) in the radiologic domain. The most frequently occurring term was "radiology", which occurred 21 times in the article set. Other frequent terms were "magnetic resonance imaging" and "tomography", the counts of which were 4 and 3, respectively. A pair plot showed no correlation among the MeSH categories "Analytical Diagnostic and Therapeutic Techniques and Equipment", "Anatomy", "Biological Sciences", and "Chemicals and Drugs". We conclude that ontology research is well established in the biomedical domain, and that further study is required in the radiologic domain.