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Abstract
Objectives: The purpose of this study was to examine the feasibility of automating lexical cross-mapping of a logic-based nursing terminology (ICNP) to SNOMED CT using the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
Methods: A two-stage approach included patterns identification, and application and evaluation of an automated term matching procedure. The performance of the automated procedure was evaluated using a test set against a gold standard (i.e. concept equivalency table) created independently by terminology experts.
Results: There were lexical similarities between ICNP diagnostic concepts and SNOMED CT. The automated term matching procedure was reliable as presented in recall of 65%, precision of 79%, accuracy of 82%, F-measure of 0.71 and the area under the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve of 0.78 (95% CI 0.73–0.83). When the automated procedure was not able to retrieve lexically matched concepts, it was also unlikely for terminology experts to identify a matched SNOMED CT concept.
Conclusions: Although further research is warranted to enhance the automated matching procedure, the combination of cross-maps from UMLS and the automated procedure is useful to generate candidate mappings and thus, assist ongoing maintenance of mappings which is a significant burden to terminology developers.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to acknowledge support from the International Council of Nurses in conducting this study as well as Drs. Amy Coenen and Nicholas Hardiker for their review of an early version of this manuscript.
DECLARATION OF INTEREST
The author reports no conflicts of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of this article.