Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 13.9
Knee representation in RadLex
TM
term browser [
18
]
Unlike traditional terminological resources whose terms are predefined and fixed,
this model comprises rules to combine entities so that many descriptions can be com-
posed from a manageable number of base concepts, resulting in the building blocks
to define procedures. The main cores of the project are the Semantic Encyclopedia of
Terminology (SET), which consists of a generative Master Notation, and a COding
REference (CORE) Model for medical terminology.
13.3.5 Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)
The UMLS, or Unified Medical Language System [
21
], is a software designed to
bring together many health and biomedical vocabularies and standards to enable
interoperability among ontology systems (see Fig.
13.10
). The purpose of the Na-
tional Library of Medicine
Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is to facil-
itate the development of computer systems that behave as if they “understand” the
meaning of the language of biomedicine and health.
Three UMLS Knowledge Sources exist:
The Metathesaurus
, which contains over one million biomedical concepts from
over 100 source vocabularies, such as ICD-9-CM [
22
], NCI Thesaurus [
23
],
•
