title: Effectively processing medical term queries on the UMLS Metathesaurus by layered dynamic programming.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Mapping medical terms to standardized UMLS concepts is a basic step for leveraging biomedical texts in data management and analysis. However, available methods and tools have major limitations in handling queries over the UMLS Metathesaurus that contain inaccurate query terms, which frequently appear in real world applications.
  
  
  METHODS
  To provide a practical solution for this task, we propose a layered dynamic programming mapping (LDPMap) approach, which can efficiently handle these queries. LDPMap uses indexing and two layers of dynamic programming techniques to efficiently map a biomedical term to a UMLS concept.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Our empirical study shows that LDPMap achieves much faster query speeds than LCS. In comparison to the UMLS Metathesaurus Browser and MetaMap, LDPMap is much more effective in querying the UMLS Metathesaurus for inaccurately spelled medical terms, long medical terms, and medical terms with special characters.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  These results demonstrate that LDPMap is an efficient and effective method for mapping medical terms to the UMLS Metathesaurus.
authors: Kaiyu
authors: K
authors: Ren
authors: Albert M
authors: AM
authors: Lai
authors: Aveek
authors: A
authors: Mukhopadhyay
authors: Raghu
authors: R
authors: Machiraju
authors: Kun
authors: K
authors: Huang
authors: Yang
authors: Y
authors: Xiang
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D057225:Data Mining; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000379:methods*; D012984:Software; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D013997:Time Factors; D017432:Unified Medical Language System