Using UMLS metathesaurus concepts to describe medical images: dermatology vocabulary

Authors

James W. Woods, National Library of Medicine, Ackerman–Office of High Performance Computing and Communications, USA
Charles A. Sneiderman, National Library of Medicine, Ackerman–Office of High Performance Computing and Communications, USA
Kamran Hamid, Aga Khan UniversityFollow
Michael J. .Ackerman, National Library of Medicine, Ackerman–Office of High Performance Computing and Communications, USA
Charlie Hatton, Brookline, MA, USA

Document Type

Article

Department

Internal Medicine (East Africa)

Abstract

Web servers at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) displayed images of ten skin lesions to practicing dermatologists and provided an online form for capturing text they used to describe the pictures. The terms were submitted to the UMLS Metathesaurus (Meta). Concepts retrieved, their semantic types, definitions and synonyms, were returned to each subject in a second web-based form. Subjects rated the concepts against their own descriptive terms.

They submitted 825 terms, 346 of which were unique and 300 mapped to UMLS concepts. The dermatologists rated 295 concepts as ‘Exact Match’ and they accomplished both tasks in about 30 min.

Comments

This work was published before the author joined Aga Khan University.

Publication (Name of Journal)

Computers in Biology and Medicine

Recommended Citation

Woods, J. W., Sneiderman, C. A., Hameed, K., Ackerman, M. J., & Hatton, C. (2006). Using UMLS metathesaurus concepts to describe medical images: dermatology vocabulary. Computers in Biology and Medicine, 36(1), 89-100.