OBJECTIVE Formalisms based on one or other flavor of description logic (DL) are sometimes put forward as helping to ensure that terminologies and controlled vocabularies comply with sound ontological principles. The objective of this paper is to study the degree to which one DL-based biomedical terminology (SNOMED CT) does indeed comply with such principles. MATERIALS AND METHODS We defined s...

BACKGROUND In order to satisfy different needs, medical terminology systems must have richer structures. This study examines whether a Swedish primary health care version of the mono-hierarchical ICD-10 (KSH97-P) may obtain a richer structure using category and chapter mappings from KSH97-P to SNOMED CT and SNOMED CT's structure. Manually-built mappings from KSH97-P's categories and chapters to...

Semantic interoperability of health systems will be only possible if clinical data models, such as OpenEHR Archetypes, are agreed by experts and aligned to standard terminology systems. In this paper we present an automated approach combining mapping algorithms to align clinical archetype terms to SNOMED CT concepts.

If SNOMED CT is to serve as a biomedical reference terminology, then steps must be taken to ensure comparability of information formulated using successive versions. New releases are therefore shipped with a history mechanism. We assessed the adequacy of this mechanism for its treatment of the distinction between changes occurring on the side of entities in reality and changes in our understand...

Medical language processing depends on large-coverage, fine-grained specialized lexicons. The vast majority of existing electronic lexicons concern the English language; for other languages such as French, resources are scarce. In contrast, large medical thesauri exist in numerous languages, including French. Our goal was to study what kind of linguistic information could be extracted from thes...

A standard electronic health record (EHR) and interoperable national health information infrastructure require the use of uniform health information standards, including a common medical language. Data must be collected and maintained in a standardized format, using uniform definitions, in order to link data within an EHR system or share health information between systems. The lack of standards...

In the GALEN project, the syntactic-semantic tagger MultiTALE is upgraded to extract knowledge from natural language surgical procedure expressions. In this paper, we describe the methodology applied and show that out of a randomly selected sample of such expressions coming from the procedure axis of Snomed International, 81% could be analysed correctly. The problems encountered fall in three d...

Acquisition and enrichment of lexical resources is an important research area for the computational linguistics. We propose a method for inducing a lexicon of synonyms and for its weighting in order to establish its reliability. The method is based on the analysis of syntactic structure of complex terms. We apply and evaluate the approach on three biomedical terminologies (MeSH, Snomed Int, Sno...

and objective The alignment of the two terminologies SNOMED CT and the upcoming ICD-11 is on the agenda of the harmonisation between WHO (World Health Organisation) and IHTSDO (International Health Terminology Standard Development Organisation). This requires setting up and maintaining the validity of their cross-mappings to support seamless reuse and semantic interoperability. Due to the diffe...

Clinical documentation needs to be fine-grained to truthfully represent the history, development, and treatment of a patient. But natural language, as the main information carrier, is characterized by many issues, like idiosyncratic terminology, spelling and grammar errors, and a lack of grammatical structure. Therefore coding systems, like ICD-10, have been introduced, but their use varies hig...