Mining Hierarchical Pathology Data Using Inductive Logic Programming

Considerable amounts of data are continuously generated by pathologists in the form of pathology reports. To date, there has been relatively little work exploring how to apply machine learning and data mining techniques to these data in order to extract novel clinical relationships. From a learning perspective, these pathology data possess a number of challenging properties, in particular, the temporal and hierarchical structure that is present within the data. In this paper, we propose a methodology based on inductive logic programming to extract novel associations from pathology excerpts. We discuss the challenges posed by analyzing these data and discuss how we address them. As a case study, we apply our methodology to Dutch pathology data for discovering possible causes of two rare diseases: cholangitis and breast angiosarcomas.