Tao Ying, Mendonca Eneida A, Lussier Yves A
Department of Medical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2003;2003:1028.
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.
在支持术语具有多个父项的医学术语中找到多个术语之间的层次关系是一项常见任务，对于实施或维护医学逻辑模块或指南的实习生和知识工程师来说尤其如此。此类术语的示例包括统一医学语言系统（UMLS）和医学实体词典（MED）。此外，识别和区分术语列表的一些共同祖先的任务是一个反复出现的主题。这也是分类学（系统学）中的一个常见问题。一些最近的共同祖先对于列表的分类和简化具有独特的宝贵属性。虽然存在一些用于UMLS和MED的可视化导航和编辑工具，但它们是浏览器，显示了与手头任务大量无关和不相关的关系。虽然在计算机科学中已经对解决语义网络和树上此类问题的算法进行了深入研究，但据我们所知，它们尚未与生物医学中的可视化工具一起使用。我们开发了一种可视化工具，以图形方式显示多个术语的层次关系，并有助于识别这些术语的最近共同祖先。
