Comparing the representation of anatomy in the FMA and SNOMED CT.
OBJECTIVE
This paper reports on the alignment between two large ontologies of anatomy: the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) and the representation of anatomical structures in SNOMED CT. The objective of this study is to investigate the compatibility between a reference ontology of anatomy (the FMA, 75,019 concepts) and a representation of anatomy created for use in clinical applications (SNOMED CT, 30,933 anatomical concepts).


METHODS
The alignment first identifies shared concepts lexically. The presence of shared relations across ontologies is then used to validate the mappings structurally.


RESULTS
8,228 mappings were identified by lexical methods, of which over 97% were supported by structural evidence. No evidence was found for 0.5% of the mappings and 2.5% received negative evidence.


CONCLUSIONS
Despite important differences in coverage and knowledge representation between the FMA and SNOMED CT, we have not noticed any major discrepancies in their representation of anatomical entities.
Bodenreider
Olivier
O
National Library of Medicine, NIH, Bethesda, Maryland, USA. olivier@nlm.nih.gov
Zhang
Songmao
S
D000715:Anatomy / Q000145:classification*; D006801:Humans; D039061:Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled