Using lexical and logical methods for the alignment of medical terminologies

Standardized medical terminologies are often used for the registration of patient data. In several situations there is a need to align these terminologies to other terminologies. Even when the terminologies cover the same domain, this is often a non-trivial task. The task is even more complicated when the terminology docs not contain much structure. In this paper we describe the initial results of a procedure for mapping a terminology with little or no structure to a structure-rich terminology. This procedure uses the knowledge of the structure-rich terminology and a method for semantic explication of concept descriptions. The first results shows that, when compared to approaches based on syntactic analysis only, the recall can be greatly improved without sacrificing much of the precision.