Biomedical term normalization of EHRs with UMLS
This addresses the lack of tools for Spanish clinical text normalization, but it is incremental as it adapts existing methods to a new language.
The paper tackled biomedical term normalization for Spanish electronic health records by developing a prototype using UMLS, achieving evaluation through agreement with MetaMap on parallel corpora.
This paper presents a novel prototype for biomedical term normalization of electronic health record excerpts with the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus. Despite being multilingual and cross-lingual by design, we first focus on processing clinical text in Spanish because there is no existing tool for this language and for this specific purpose. The tool is based on Apache Lucene to index the Metathesaurus and generate mapping candidates from input text. It uses the IXA pipeline for basic language processing and resolves ambiguities with the UKB toolkit. It has been evaluated by measuring its agreement with MetaMap in two English-Spanish parallel corpora. In addition, we present a web-based interface for the tool.