The NeuroPsychological Testing Ontology (NPT) represents standardized neuropsychological assessments, such as those used by the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). NPT provides a set of classes for the annotation of neuropsychological testing data and is designed to enable integration of results from a variety of neuropsychological tests by representing the tests in greater granularity and connecting each sub-assay to the cognitive function(s) it measures. In this way, relevant data from multiple tests -- whether from entire tests, test sub-sections, or individual test components -- can be readily aggregated and studied.
Neuropsychological testing is an important component in developing the clinical pictures used in the diagnosis of patients with a range of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and following stroke or traumatic brain injury. An initial goal of this project is to test hypotheses about the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease based on the results of neuropsychological assessments.
NPT currently includes representations of the following assessments:
- Folstein Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) (sample exam)
- Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) (sample exam)
- Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale (ADAS)
- Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT)
- Trail-Making Test
Future work will expand its coverage to include additional tests, such as:
- Hopkins Verbal Learning Test (HVLT)
- Wechsler Memory Scale - Fourth Edition (WMS-IV)
NPT is being developed in accordance with the OBO Foundry principles. It extends the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI), which utilizes the Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) and the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). NPT is a corollary project of the Neurological Disease Ontology (ND).
For more information about NPT, the paper “Ontologies for the Study of Neurological Diseases” discusses both NPT and ND. It was presented at the workshop “Towards an Ontology of Mental Functioning” on July 22 during the ICBO 2012: 3rd International Conference on Biomedical Ontology in Graz, Austria. The slides from this presentation are available here.