Designing an ontology for Head and Neck Cancer research

Head and Neck Cancer (HNC) is one of the cancers with the highest mortality and recurrence rates. Nowadays, HNC research is focused on enhancing the prognostic and quality of life of patients. This disease involves heterogeneous and multiscale data that should be integrated and analyzed during the process of diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of HNC. In this work, we propose a solution capable of integrating all this data, providing a standardized vocabulary of terms involved during the HNC research process. The solution is based on the creation of the first ontology that models the HNC disease and collects and organize hierarchically, not only the data at patient level, but also population data and concepts related to clinical and scientific literature.