Integration of a standard gastrointestinal endoscopy terminology in the UMLS Metathesaurus

MST(c), a standard terminology for gastrointestinal endoscopy reporting, was integrated in the January 2002 UMLS Metathesaurus in order to ease the practical interoperability of clinical data repositories in gastroenterology. The integration required full specification of names, resolution of discrepancies between English, French and Italian versions of MST, appropriate categorization with UMLS Semantic Types and MST-level Class attributes, assignment of explicit intra-table (and some useful inter-table) relationships mainly at concept level but also at the source level in order to retain and fully represent the original explicit and implicit MST organization. Main results, problems encountered and future plans are discussed.