Graphical Mapping of a Data Ontology for Descriptive Patient Data

The decreasing cost of multi-omic health data has enabled the personalization of medical care. Still, capturing a patient's personal health data in medical forms is challenging. The symptoms of an illness can often be traced to an activity or a body part and communicating this to an untrained patient is often unclear. To address this problem, we mapped an ontology of human disease phenotypes to a graphical depiction of the human body. We hypothesized that describing the experience of illness in a somatic representation would give patients a more accurate and descriptive understanding of their illness. The representation can support health care workers to provide more accurate analyses, aid caretakers in managing health risks and empower patients to take action to better their health.