Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2007;129(Pt 1):605-9.

Combining lexical and semantic methods of inter-terminology mapping using the UMLS

Kin Wah Fung  1 , Olivier Bodenreider, Alan R Aronson, William T Hole, Suresh Srinivasan
Affiliations

Combining lexical and semantic methods of inter-terminology mapping using the UMLS

Kin Wah Fung et al. Stud Health Technol Inform. 2007.

Abstract

The need for inter-terminology mapping is constantly increasing with the growth in the volume of electronically captured biomedical data and the demand to re-use the same data for secondary purposes. Using the UMLS as a knowledge base, semantically-based and lexically-based mappings were generated from SNOMED CT to ICD9CM terms and compared to a gold standard. Semantic mapping performed better than lexical mapping in terms of coverage, recall and precision. As the two mapping methods are orthogonal, the two sets of mappings can be used to validate and enhance each other. A method of combining the mappings based on the precision level of sub-categories in each method was derived. The combined method outperformed both methods, achieving coverage of 91%, recall of 43% and precision of 27%. It is also possible to customize the method of combination to optimize performance according to the task at hand.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Rocha RA, Rocha BH, Huff SM. Automated translation between medical vocabularies using a frame-based interlingua. Proc Annu Symp Comput Appl Med Care. 1993:690–4. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Cimino JJ, Barnett GO. Automated translation between medical terminologies using semantic definitions. MD Comput. 1990;7:104–9. - PubMed
    1. Barrows RC, Jr, Cimino JJ, Clayton PD. Mapping clinically useful terminology to a controlled medical vocabulary. Proceedings - the Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care. 1994:211–5. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Dolin RH, Huff SM, Rocha RA, Spackman KA, Campbell KE. Evaluation of a “lexically assign, logically refine” strategy for semi-automated integration of overlapping terminologies. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 1998;5:203–13. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Masarie FE, Jr, Miller RA, Bouhaddou O, Giuse NB, Warner HR. An interlingua for electronic interchange of medical information: using frames to map between clinical vocabularies. Comput Biomed Res. 1991;24:379–400. - PubMed

Publication types