Advances in Computational Sciences and Technology ISSN 0973-6107 Volume 8, Number 1 (2015) pp. 53-65 © Research India Publications http://www.ripublication.com An Ontology-Based Expert System for General Practitioners to Diagnose Cardiovascular Diseases Baydaa Taha Al-Hamadani1, Raad Fadhil Alwan2 1 Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Zarqa University, Zarqa 13132, Jordan. Tel: +962-77-5663578. E-mail:
[email protected] 2 Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Philadelphia University, Aman 19392, Jordan. Tel: +962-77-7426528. E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract According to World Health Organization, Cardiovascular diseases are the number one cause of death worldwide. Diagnosing the disease in the right time could lower the danger that it may cause. This paper presents an expert system to assist the General Practitioners (GP) to diagnose any kind of coronary artery diseases. The system supplies the experts with the diagnosing strategies that could be used and suggests the drugs and/or other required operations to be taken alongside with the explanation about the given decision. The design of the system depends on ontology knowledge about the patient’s symptoms to build the knowledge base and then it utilizes Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) to deduce the suitable medicine and the required operation for the patient. The system was tested by several GPs using 16 instances to test the validation and the evaluation of the system. Recall and precision factors were calculated 0.83 and 0.87 respectively which considered being reasonable values. 1. Introduction Although medical expert systems are challenging due to huge amount of knowledge and its complexity, the use of these systems witnesses a fast growing in recent years.