UNIFIED MEDICAL LANGUAGE SYTEM

Group 4: Gonzales, Lamberte, Ordanez,

Sambayon
What is UMLS?
• The UMLS OR Unified Medical
Language System, is set of files and
software that brings together many
health and biomedical vocabularies
and standards to enable
interoperability between computer
systems.
• This project was initiated in 1986 by
Dr. Donald A.B Lindberg, MD
• Director of the National Library of
Medicine and is still being maintained
and funded by the NLM.
Uses of UMLS
You can use UMLS to enhance or
develop applications such as
electronic health records,
classification tools, dictionaries
and language.
It is used in linking health information, medical terms
drug names, and billing codes across different computer
systems. Some examples of this are:
 Linking terms and codes between your doctor and
your pharmacy and your insurance company.
 Patient care coordination among several departments
within a hospital.
 The UMLS has many other uses including search
engine, retrieval, data mining, public health statistics
reporting, and terminology research.
The Three UMLS Tools
which we call the Knowledge Sources:

Metathesaurus: It is the heart of

UMLS. It contains terms, codes from
over millions of biomedical concept
from over 100 vocabularies, and
standards including CPT, ICD-10-
CM, LOINC, MeSH, RxNorm, and
SNOMED CT etc.
• Metathesaurus :
o Are classified into categories
o Has unique identifiers
oPreferred terms
o Can be grouped into subsets
o Can be extracted into two
formats:
RRF OR ORF
  Semantic Network: Broad
categories (semantic types) and
their relationships (semantic
relations).
• There are 135 Semantic types and 54
relationship in total. Major Semantic
Type are organism, anatomic structure,
biological functions, chemicals, events,
physical objects, concepts or ideas.
This semantic type and relationship can
be best used into semantic program,
the UMLS Terminologies.
SPECIALIST Lexicon and Lexical Tools:
 These are the software programs used
in natural language processing tools.
 It contains information about common
English vocabularies, biomedical
terms etc.
 We use Semantic Network and Lexical Tools to produce the
Metathesaurus.

Metathesaurus production involves:

 Processing terms and codes using Lexical Tools

 Grouping synonymous terms into concepts
 Categorizing concepts by semantic types from the Semantic
Network
 Incorporating relationships and attributes provided by
vocabularies
 Releasing the data in a common format
The Specialist Lexicon has been developed to provide
lexical information needed for the specialist Natural
Language processing System(NLP). It is intended to be
general English Lexicon that includes many biomedical
terms. Coverage includes both commonly occurring
English words and biomedical vocabulary. The Lexicon
entry for each word or term records the syntactic,
morphological and orthographic information needed by
the specialist in NLP System.
The lexical programs or tools are designed to address the high degree
of variability in natural language terms or words. Words often have
several inflected forms which would properly be considered instances
of the same word. The verb “treat” , for e.g. has 3 inflectional variants:
“treats”-the 3rd person singular present tense form, “treated,” the past
and past participle form, and “treating” the present participle form.
Multi-word terms in Metathesaurus and other controlled vocabularies
may have other variants in addition to their inflectional alphabetic
case variants. The lexical tools allow the user to abstract away from
this sort of variation.
The UMLS Terminology Services( UTS) provides three
ways to access the UMLS:
o Metathesaurus Browser-Retrieve UMLS concept
information, including CUI’s, semantic types, and
synonymous terms.
o Semantic Network Browser-view the names,
definitions, and hierarchical structure of the Semantic
Network.
Local Installation
 To install the UMLS on your computer,
download files through the UTS. The
MetamorphoSys tool, include with the
downloaded files, allows you to customized
data in your own database system such as the
MySQL or Oracle, or you may browse your
data using the MetamorphoSys RRF browser.
WEB SERVICES API’s
• You can use your
application interfaces
(API’s) to query the
UMLS data within your
own application.
How to get started with
UMLS….
 UMLS license are issued only to individuals and not to groups
or organizations.
 There is no charge for licensing the UMLS from NLM. NLM is a
member of IHTSDO (owner of SNOMED CT), and there is no
charge for SNOMED CT use in the U.S and other member
countries. Some uses of the UMLS may require additional
agreements with individual terminology vendors.
 The UTS account allows you to browse, download, and query
the UMLS.
Thank you all for
listening . And good
morning……