Using formal ontology for the representation of morphological properties of anatomical structures in endoscopic surgery

Abstract In this paper we present results to the problem of an adequate and compact symbolic representation of morphological features of anatomical structures that serve as surgical landmarks for automated assistance in endoscopic surgery using the General Formal Ontology (GFO) as a formal framework. For this purpose, we employed a translation from this first-order logic representation to a more compact description logic based formalism with the associated benefits, such as the availability of decidable reasoning procedures, for the purpose of automated landmark recognition in a hybrid symbolic/subsymbolic AI approach.