Describing localized diseases in medical ontology: an FMA-based algorithm

OntolUrgences is a termino-ontological resource developed to index and retrieve information in electronic Emergency Medical Record. In this project, we improved the ontology coverage to accommodate both anatomical and pathophysiological concepts in emergency medicine. This work lead to the automatic addition of 3,470 concepts and their underlying semantic formalization. In our method, we reuse and select the anatomical concepts relevant to emergency from FMA: To capture the anatomical specific concepts, (i) we involved Emergency practitioners and identified the key concepts from this domain; (ii) we applied an automatic algorithm to define the semantic relationships and integrated the result in the existing ontology.

Functional requirements of terminology services for coupling interface terminologies to reference terminologies

Desiderata for interface terminologies (IT), designed to support interactions between humans and structured medical information, differ from desiderata for reference terminologies (RT). Terminology experts have recommended that IT be mapped to RT. The interface terminology of the Georges Pompidou European Hospital (GPEH-IT) contains more than 5,000 concepts, sometimes linked to ICD-10 but not yet to the SNOMED 3.5 VF, now available in France. Our objective was to use a formal characterization framework to compare GPEH-IT to SNOMED 3.5 VF and to define the functionalities of terminology services for managing both IT and RT and the mapping between them. We discuss the role of IT and RT in representing the meaning of clinical data.