A Comparative Study on the 'Sign or Symptom' Concepts of the UMLS(Unified Medical Language System) and Clinical Terms in Korean Medical Records

Han, Seung Bin; Choi, Jin Wook

Abstract

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.