A "systematics" tool for medical terminologies.

Finding the hierarchical relations amongst multiple terms within medical terminologies that support multiple parents to a term is a common task, especially for trainees and knowledge engineers implementing or maintaining medical logic modules or guidelines. Examples of such terminologies include the UMLS and the Medical Entity Dictionary (MED). In addition, the task of identifying and discriminating amongst some common ancestors to a list of terms is a recurrent theme. This is also a common concern in the science of classification (systematics). Some nearest common ancestors have distinct valuable properties for classification and simplification of lists. Although there exist some visualized navigating and editing tools for the UMLS and the MED, they are browsers that show a large number of unrelated and irrelevant relationships to the task at hand. While algorithms have been well studied in computer science to solve such a problem over semantic networks and trees, to our knowledge, they have not been used with a visualization tool in biomedicine. We developed a visualized tool that graphically displays the hierarchical relations of multiple terms, and helps identifying the nearest common ancestors of these terms.