Fuzzy ontology-based approach for liver fibrosis diagnosis

•We proposed a system is based on LiverFibroOnto that describes concepts related to patient symptoms and different risk factors of the Viral hepatitis C virus (HCV).•The proposal of an intelligent clinical DSS system that utilizes fuzzy conceptual representations capabilities, the knowledge contained in the semantic repository, and a rule-based engine.•The proposed system infers the severity of the disease to help the patient to counteract the disease.•We tested the developed system using a real dataset for fibrosis diagnosis.•The performance of the proposed system was compared with that of the now-standard Mamdani fuzzy inference system and demonstrated higher performance, with 97.8% accuracy.