OBJECTIVE: To Implement Effective Vocabulary Viewer for Electronic Medical Vocabulary Database Such as MED. DESIGN: A few Medical Vocabulary Database access method are reviewed. Some of their disadvantage of acquiring specific medical concepts are identified. MED has chosen as an example Medical Vocabulary System. We studied AccessMED, a vocabulary browser that supports lexical matching and the traversal of hierarchical and semantic links, and enhanced methodology of medical vocabulary browsing and acquiring medical vocabulary. RESULTS: The paper suggests platform independent client-server architecture Medical Vocabulary Viewer, MEDUSA. Additional support for Medical Vocabulary Browsing options such as display all ancestor, multiple concepts displaying, and bookmarking workspaces are implemented. CONCLUSION: Since MEDUSA uses client-server architecture along with scripting language such as TCL/TK as implementation language, it runs multiple platform. We claim MEDUSA can be easily integrated with other Medical Vocabulary such as UMLS. Using bookmark and annotation function of MEDUSA enables many vocabulary developers from multiple sites to communicate and discuss new concepts better.
Semantics ; Unified Medical Language System ; Vocabulary*

Based on pathological lung cancer cases and semantic network technology, and in combination with UMLS, the article discusses the applications of semantic network technology in electron medical records, and its actualization of pathological case semantic network expression with sequence characteristics.
Health Records, Personal ; Semantics ; Unified Medical Language System

The UMLS is a long-term NLM research and development effort designed to facilitate the retrieval and integration of information from multiple machine-readable biomedical information sources. It is one of the most comprehensive medical terminology systems. The UMLS is to make available to develop systems such as information retrieval, decision-making support system, natural language processing, and voice recognition in medical fields because it can be easily integrated with other systems or databases. It is now support about 15 languages like French, German, Finnish, and Spanish. The goal of this paper is to estimate the availabilities and usefulness that when we will apply the electronic medical records system and then support to Korean medical vocabulary integration. We tested mapping between chief complaint extracted from the discharge records in Seoul National University Hospital and the UMLS sign or symptom concepts term. Among 35% of chief complaint of the SNUH were Conceptually matched with the UMLS Sign or Symptom concepts. Most of 58% these terms were such that diagnosis, operation names, clinical laboratory test not Sign or Symptom terms. The rest terms of 7% were not found in the UMLS or these terms that different application of used concepts. While the UMLS terms are so specific and diverse about patients sign or symptom, we used simplified and usually based on the anatomical region records. Through this study, we exposed underlying of flaws currently in use clinical terms and analyzed the differences of expression patterns in clinical records between the two vocabulary system, we propose the UMLS application of Korean medical vocabulary translation with appropriateness and Interoperability of the UMLS for development the Korean medical technologies.
Diagnosis ; Electronic Health Records ; Humans ; Information Storage and Retrieval ; Medical Records* ; Natural Language Processing ; Seoul ; Unified Medical Language System ; Vocabulary ; Voice

Nursing language plays an important role in describing and defining nursing phenomena and nursing actions. There are numerous vocabularies describing nursing diagnoses, interventions, and outcomes in nursing domain. However, lack of a standardized, unified nursing language is considered as a problem for further development of the discipline of nursing. With this background this study was conducted to construct a semantic network based on cross mapping of existing nursing terminologies. specifically NANDA taxonomy I, Omaha system, HHCC. and NIC. which arc recognized as standard terminology by the American Nurses Association. The nursing semantic network was proposed with the cross mapping results based on the UMLS semantic network.
American Nurses' Association ; Classification ; Nursing Diagnosis ; Nursing* ; Semantics* ; Unified Medical Language System ; Vocabulary

OBJECTIVE: For the effective retrieval of clinical information, the elaborate indexing is essential. Two major types of indexing are the human indexing and the automatic or machine indexing. Human indexing shows higher quality but is time consuming, labor-intensive and inconsistent in term assignment activity. METHODS: Using the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) MetaMap program, we mapped the free text from the diagnosis section of radiology reports into UMLS concepts. To improve the precision of UMLS concept indexing by MetaMap, we evaluated the UMLS subset mapping and semantic type filtering methods, determining the best combination for improved precision. RESULTS: After calculating the candidates from subset combinations, we obtained more enhanced results by semantic-type filtering. CONCLUSION: The results may be improved for the complete automation of indexing process.
Abstracting and Indexing as Topic* ; Automation ; Diagnosis ; Humans ; Semantics ; Unified Medical Language System*

BACKGROUND: Standardization of medical terminology is essential for data transmission between health-care institutions or clinical laboratories and for maximizing the benefits of information technology. Purpose of our study was to standardize the medical terms used in the clinical laboratory, such as test names, units, terms used in result descriptions, etc. During the first year of the study, we developed a standard database of concept names for laboratory terms, which covered the terms used in government health care centers, their branch offices, and primary health care units. METHODS: Laboratory terms were collected from the electronic data interchange (EDI) codes from National Health Insurance Corporation (NHIC), Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes (LOINC) database, community health centers and their branch offices, and clinical laboratories of representative university medical centers. For standard expression, we referred to the English-Korean/ Korean-English medical dictionary of Korean Medical Association and the rules for foreign language translation. Programs for mapping between LOINC DB and EDI code and for translating English to Korean were developed. RESULTS: A Korean standard laboratory terminology database containing six axial concept names such as components, property, time aspect, system (specimen), scale type, and method type was established for 7,508 test observations. Short names and a mapping table for EDI codes and Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) were added. Synonym tables for concept names, words used in the database, and six axial terms were prepared to make it easier to find the standard terminology with common terms used in the field of laboratory medicine. CONCLUSIONS: Here we report for the first time a Korean standard laboratory terminology database for test names, result description terms, result units covering most laboratory tests in primary healthcare centers.
Clinical Laboratory Techniques/*classification/standards ; Databases, Factual ; Korea ; Language ; *Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes ; Terminology as Topic ; *Unified Medical Language System

Medical vocabularies in medical records are used in several synonyms and various expressions even though they are same concepts. Query expansion using a thesaurus enhances recall of medical information retrieval (IR) system for searching patient records or literatures. This study proposed IR system architecture applied the Metathesaurus of Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). To enhance the retrieval effectiveness at the same time to reduce retrieval time, we reconstructed condensed Metathesaurus (CMT), which is constituted of frequently used terms in medical records. We used 40,000 radiology reports of Brain CT/MRI at Seoul National University Hospital. The retrieval model we used is the Boolean methods. The results showed 15~27% effectiveness for searching relevant documents implementing the UMLS MT into IR system for query expansion. But it took 3.5 times longer for retrieval compared with non-MT implemented IR system. When we applied the CMT into IR system, however, the retrieval time reduced by 50% and the retrieval performance decreased only 8.7% compared with all MT implemented IR system. In this paper, we developed the medical document retrieval system applied UMLS MT for query expansion methods that can improve the relevant document retrieval performance, at the same time it can reduce the retrieval time through consisting condensed Metathesaurus for a specific domain.
Brain ; Computing Methodologies ; Humans ; Information Storage and Retrieval* ; Medical Records ; Seoul ; Unified Medical Language System* ; Vocabulary ; Vocabulary, Controlled

OBJECTIVE: A reference terminology is essential to achieve semantic interoperability and enhance the quality of health care. Reference terminologies that have achieved common acceptance contain many concepts that clinicians would not want in healthcare, which preclude their practical use in documentation of patient information. To solve the problems, this document proposes a reference terminology model which contains concepts that physicians can use satisfactorily. METHODS: We analyzed the structures of the UMLS and SNOMED CT. We also analyzed health care terms which had been collected by the Korea National Health Information Standard Committee. Based on the results of the analysis, we developed an object-oriented reference terminology model. And, we designed database schema with the model. RESULTS: Eight components of the UMLS and six components of the SNOMED CT were analyzed. The collected terms had various properties and mapping vocabularies according to the characteristics of their respective domains. A reference terminology model was developed from a three-level view using UML. A database schema was developed using ERD. CONCLUSION: This study mainly focuses on reference terminology modeling. It is hoped that this reference terminology modeling helps the semantic interoperable exchange of clinical documents as the basis of common EMR.
Delivery of Health Care* ; Hope ; Humans ; Korea ; Quality of Health Care ; Semantics ; Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine ; Unified Medical Language System ; Vocabulary

Standardization of medical terminology is essential in data transmission between health care institutes and in maximizing the benefits of information technology. The purpose of this study was to standardize medical terms for laboratory observations. During the second year of the study, a standard database of concept names for laboratory terms that covered those used in tertiary health care institutes and reference laboratories was developed. The laboratory terms in the Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes (LOINC) database were adopted and matched with the electronic data interchange (EDI) codes in Korea. A public hearing and a workshop for clinical pathologists were held to collect the opinions of experts. The Korean standard laboratory terminology database containing six axial concept names, components, property, time aspect, system (specimen), scale type, and method type, was established for 29,340 test observations. Short names and mapping tables for EDI codes and UMLS were added. Synonym tables were prepared to help match concept names to common terms used in the fields. We herein described the Korean standard laboratory terminology database for test names, result description terms, and result units encompassing most of the laboratory tests in Korea.
Clinical Laboratory Information Systems/*standards ; Humans ; Laboratory Techniques and Procedures/*standards ; *Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes ; Terminology as Topic ; *Unified Medical Language System