What is a medical knowledge graph?

A medical knowledge graph is a particular type of knowledge base that organizes itself around the relationship between the nodes or entities that make up the graph. Articulating this data as a graph allows for the use of graph-based approaches to querying and working with the data.

For example, three type of nodes in the Lexigraph are drugs, anatomy parts, and diseases. Disease nodes are connected to each other; for example Diabetes Type I (node 1) and Diabetes Type II (node 2) are both types of Diabetes (node 3).

Relationships

Diabetes can also be connected to anatomy parts, such as is the case with the feet (Diabetic Foot Ulcers) and the eyes (Diabetic Retinopathy). Drugs are also related to diseases, for example with Insulin and Metformin, both of which are used to treat diabetes. Drugs have relationships to parts of the body as well, for example adrenergic drugs that affect the nervous system.

All of these relationships create a web of data that can be used in computing applications to help them “think” about medicine similarly to how a human might. Lexigram’s Knowledge Graph powers all of our software and is also available directly via our APIs.