METHODOLOGY FOR USING THE UMLS AS A BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE FOR THE DESCRIPTION OF SURGICAL-PROCEDURES

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) contains and organizes a la rge number of terms from a variety of biomedical terminology systems. This study examines the relevance of the UMLS content and structures t o the specific purpose of the conceptual representation of medical pro cedures. The MAOUSSC modelling is a compositional formalism with a des cription of elementary procedures in terms of elementary concept entit ies and combinations of such descriptions into more complex ones. The UMLS knowledge base is expected to provide semantically categorized me dical concepts and interconcept relations. A method to reuse the UMLS has been developed. Quantitative and qualitative results are presented . Some difficulties in reusing the UMLS as a background knowledge are related to the preeminence of some terminology sources and to the inst anciation of interconcept links. Other ones suggest that purpose-indep endence in categorization cannot be achieved.