From knowledge silos to integrated insights: building a cardiovascular medication knowledge graph for enhanced medication knowledge retrieval, relationship discovery, and reasoning.

Abstract

Background: Cardiovascular diseases are diverse, intersecting, and characterized by multistage complexity. The growing demand for personalized diagnosis and treatment poses significant challenges to clinical diagnosis and pharmacotherapy, increasing potential medication risks for doctors and patients. The Cardiovascular Medication Guide (CMG) demonstrates distinct advantages in managing cardiovascular disease, serving as a critical reference for front-line doctors in prescription selection and treatment planning. However, most medical knowledge remains fragmented within written records, such as medical files, without a cohesive organizational structure, leading to an absence of clinical support from visualized expert knowledge systems.

Purpose: This study aims to construct a comprehensive Expert Knowledge Graph of Cardiovascular Medication Guidelines (EKG-CMG) by integrating unstructured and semi-structured Cardiovascular Medication Knowledge (CMK), including clinical guidelines and expert consensus, to create a visually integrated cardiovascular expert knowledge system.

Methods: This study utilized consensus and guidelines from cardiovascular experts to organize and manage structured knowledge. BERT and knowledge extraction techniques capture drug attribute relationships, leading to the construction of the EKG-CMG with fine-grained information. The Neo4j graph database stores expert knowledge, visualizes knowledge structures and semantic relationships, and supports retrieval, discovery, and reasoning of knowledge about medication. A hierarchical-weighted, multidimensional relational model to mine medication relationships through reverse reasoning. Experts participated in an iterative review process, allowing targeted refinement of expert medication knowledge reasoning.

Results: We construct an ontology encompassing 12 cardiovascular "medication types" and their "attributes of medication types". Approximately 15,000 entity-relationships include 22,475 medication entities, 2,027 entity categories, and 3,304 relationships. Taking beta-blockers (β) as an example demonstrates the complete process of ontology to knowledge graph construction and application, encompassing 41 AMTs, 1,197 entity nodes, and 1,351 relationships. The EKG-CMG can complete knowledge retrieval and discovery linked to "one drug for multiple uses," "combination therapy," and "precision medication." Additionally, we analyzed the knowledge reasoning case of cross-symptoms and complex medication for complications.

Conclusion: The EKG-CMG systematically organizes CMK, effectively addressing the "knowledge island" issues between diseases and drugs. Knowledge potential relationships have been exposed by leveraging EKG-CMG visualization technology, which can facilitate medication semantic retrieval and the exploration and reasoning of complex knowledge relationships.