Automated Mapping of Observation Archetypes to SNOMED CT Concepts - Foundations on Natural and Artificial Computation - page 551

Fig. 1. Respirations archetype

Table 1. Example of interprets/has interpretation relationship

Decreased skin turgor INTERPRETS Skin turgor

(finding) (observable entity)

Decreased skin turgor HAS Decreased

(finding) INTERPRETATION (qualifier value)

2.3 UMLS

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) [9] is a repository of biomedical
ontologies and vocabularies developed by the US National Library of Medicine
(NLM).Ontologies and Vocabularies integrated in the UMLS Metathesaurus in-
clude SNOMED CT, the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), OMIM and the
Digital Anatomist Symbolic Knowledge Base, etc. UMLS provides a mapping
structure among these vocabularies.
We decided to use different tools provided by the NLM for mapping terms of
the archetypes to SNOMED CT concepts for several reasons:

- UMLS integrates SNOMED CT and provides facilities for natural language
processing and a set of Metathesaurus operations which are used to locate
information eciently in the Metathesaurus [10].