Extending inner-ear anatomical concepts in the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) ontology

Abstract

The inner ear is physically inaccessible in living humans, which leads to unique difficulties in studying its normal function and pathology as in other human organs. Recently, biosimulation model has gained a significant attention to understand the exact causative factors that give rise to impairment in human organs. However, to build a biosimulation model for human organ concepts and their topological relationships from multiple and semantically overlapping domains such as biology, anatomy, geometrical, mathematical, physical models are required. In this paper, we focus on modelling the inner-ear macro anatomical concepts and their topological relationships. We extended the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) ontology to cover micro-level version of human inner-ear anatomy where connection between simulating tissues, liquids, soft tissues and connecting adjacent (e.g. hair cells, perilymph) parts studied in detail, included and implemented.