Ontology Creation and Management Tools: the Case of Anatomical Connectivity

We are developing infrastructure to support researchers in mapping data related to the peripheral nervous system and other physiological systems, with an emphasis on their relevance to the organs under investigation. The nervous system, a complex network of nerves and ganglia, plays a critical role in coordinating and transmitting signals throughout the body. To aid in this, we have created ApiNATOMY, a framework for the topological and semantic representation of multiscale physiological circuit maps. ApiNATOMY integrates a Knowledge Representation (KR) model and a suite of Knowledge Management (KM) tools. The KR model enables physiology experts to easily capture interactions between anatomical entities, while the KM tools help modelers convert high-level abstractions into detailed models of physiological processes, which can be integrated with external ontologies and knowledge graphs.

Ontology- and LLM-based Data Harmonization for Federated Learning in Healthcare

The rise of electronic health records (EHRs) has unlocked new opportunities for medical research, but privacy regulations and data heterogeneity remain key barriers to large-scale machine learning. Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative modeling without sharing raw data, yet faces challenges in harmonizing diverse clinical datasets. This paper presents a two-step data alignment strategy integrating ontologies and large language models (LLMs) to support secure, privacy-preserving FL in healthcare, demonstrating its effectiveness in a real-world project involving semantic mapping of EHR data.