title: Knowledge acquisition from the UMLS sources: application to the description of surgical procedures.
abstract: The re-usability of lexicons and knowledge in medicine is a crucial challenge. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) project has attempted to provide a repository of concepts, semantically categorized for biomedical domain. This paper describes some results about the relevance of UMLS structures for specific purposes. We have focused on the description of surgical procedures. Discussion concerns synonymy of terms, granularity of concepts, and ontology. A preliminary work on the exploitation of interconcept links by a computerized application reveals a heterogeneous implementation of those relationships. However, the UMLS provides a powerful knowledge base for developers.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire d'Informatique M¿dicale, C.H.U., rue H. Le Guilloux, F-35033 Rennes, France.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Burgun
authors.forename: O
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Bodenreider
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Denier
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Delamarre
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Botti
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Lukacs
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Mayeux
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bremond
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Kohler
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fieschi
mesh_terms: D013502:General Surgery; D012660:Semantics; D017432:Unified Medical Language System; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled