An ontology-based approach for SNOMED CT translation

SNOMED CT is a comprehensive multilingual class hierarchy of medical terms used in clinical records. Few translations are available, but, as new concepts and revisions are continuously being added, the manual translation and revision of the terms will remain a major endeavour. We propose a new approach for translating SNOMED CT terms (or named entities) using ontology mapping methods and various existing multilingual resources with translated concepts. Our purpose is generating initial candidate translations, already close to those proposed by medical experts, to be later used in a curated translation process. Our method for automatically translating SNOMED CT is being developed for Portuguese, using DBPedia, ICD-9 and Google Translate as sources of candidate translations of the clinical terms, which could later be verified. Initial results, using a manually translated Portuguese catalog of allergies and adverse reactions (CPARA) to SNOMED CT as ground truth, show that it has