SNOMED CT-powered Knowledge Graphs for Structured Clinical Data and Diagnostic Reasoning

Abstract: The effectiveness of AI in healthcare is significantly hindered by unstructured clinical documentation, which results in noisy, inconsistent, and logically fragmented training data. To address this challenge, we present a knowledge-driven framework that integrates the standardized clinical terminology SNOMED CT with the Neo4j graph database to construct a structured medical knowledge graph. In this graph, clinical entities such as diseases, symptoms, and medications are represented as nodes, and semantic relationships such as caused by,''treats,'' and ``belongs to'' are modeled as edges in Neo4j, with types mapped from formal SNOMED CT relationship concepts (e.g., \texttt{Causative agent}, \texttt{Indicated for}). This design enables multi-hop reasoning and ensures terminological consistency. By extracting and standardizing entity-relationship pairs from clinical texts, we generate structured, JSON-formatted datasets that embed explicit diagnostic pathways. These datasets are used to fine-tune LLMs, significantly improving the clinical logic consistency of their outputs. Experimental results demonstrate that our knowledge-guided approach enhances the validity and interpretability of AI-generated diagnostic reasoning, providing a scalable solution for building reliable AI-assisted clinical systems.