Biomedical subjects

Massimo Battaglia

Publications and source records attributed to Massimo Battaglia.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Ontologies supporting continuity of care: the case of heart failure.

Heart failure can be the final stage of almost any type of cardiovascular diseases. Such diseases are the leading cause of recurrent hospital stay and mortality in developed countries, and an increasingly important cause of morbidity and mortality in developing countries. In consideration of the growing incidence of this syndrome, the Province of Trento (Northern Italy) supports a research project called e-Heart Failure. The aims of this project include the implementation of a web-based patient record management system which must allow all the professionals involved in the care process to provide a shared and continuous care. This paper emphasizes the role of ontologies in supporting the continuity of care. In a complex scenario where multiple agents co-operate in order to allow continuity of care, ontologies are the essential glue to ensure semantic consistency to data and knowledge shared by the different actors involved in the process, including patients and their families.

Continuity of Patient Care↗

PubMed2004

Isolation and expansion of adult cardiac stem cells from human and murine heart.

Cardiac myocytes have been traditionally regarded as terminally differentiated cells that adapt to increased work and compensate for disease exclusively through hypertrophy. However, in the past few years, compelling evidence has accumulated suggesting that the heart has regenerative potential. Recent studies have even surmised the existence of resident cardiac stem cells, endothelial cells generating cardiomyocytes by cell contact or extracardiac progenitors for cardiomyocytes, but these findings are still controversial. We describe the isolation of undifferentiated cells that grow as self-adherent clusters (that we have termed "cardiospheres") from subcultures of postnatal atrial or ventricular human biopsy specimens and from murine hearts. These cells are clonogenic, express stem and endothelial progenitor cell antigens/markers, and appear to have the properties of adult cardiac stem cells. They are capable of long-term self-renewal and can differentiate in vitro and after ectopic (dorsal subcutaneous connective tissue) or orthotopic (myocardial infarction) transplantation in SCID beige mouse to yield the major specialized cell types of the heart: myocytes (ie, cells demonstrating contractile activity and/or showing cardiomyocyte markers) and vascular cells (ie, cells with endothelial or smooth muscle markers).

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

Coping with medical polysemy in the semantic web: the role of ontologies.

Polysemy is the linguistic phenomenon by which a term has more than one meaning. It is not a negligible issue in information management, since an effective and unambiguous sharing of the semantic content of data among different databases or knowledge repositories is needed. The paper illustrates a case of polysemy (concerning inflammation), and puts it within the framework provided by the DOLCE+ foundational ontology. This solution enables us to formally represent several senses of inflammation, and their interrelationships. This we take as a demonstration of how ontologies play an essential role in providing precisely the conceptual foundations that are needed in order to make the intended meaning of natural language expressions available to all the (artificial or human) agents that could be involved in the semantic web

Humans↗

PubMed2004

Inflammation ontology design pattern: an exercise in building a core biomedical ontology with descriptions and situations.

Formal ontology has proved to be an extremely useful tool for negotiating intended meaning, for building explicit, formal data sheets, and for the discovery of novel views on existing data structures. This paper describes an example of application of formal ontological methods to the creation of biomedical ontologies. Addressed here is the ambiguous notion of inflammation, which spans across multiple linguistic meanings, multiple layers of reality, and multiple details of granularity. We use UML class diagrams, description logics, and the DOLCE foundational ontology, augmented with the Description and Situation theory, in order to provide the representational and ontological primitives that are necessary for the development of detailed, flexible, and functional biomedical ontologies. An ontology design pattern is proposed as a modelling template for inflammations.

Humans↗

PubMed2002

ES cell media.

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Animals↗