UMLS

UMLS or Unified Medical Language System is a compendium of many controlled vocabularies in the biomedical sciences. It provides a mapping structure for various terminologies and standards used in healthcare and biomedicine. The UMLS was developed and is maintained by the National Library of Medicine, a part of the National Institutes of Health in the United States.

Overview

The UMLS integrates and distributes key terminology, classification and coding standards, and associated resources to promote creation of more effective and interoperable biomedical information systems and services, including Electronic Health Records.

The UMLS Metathesaurus, the largest component of the UMLS, is a multi-purpose, multi-lingual vocabulary database that contains information about biomedical and health related concepts, their various names, and the relationships among them. It is developed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and is one of the three parts of the UMLS.

Components

The UMLS consists of three main components:

• Metathesaurus: The Metathesaurus is a very large, multi-lingual, controlled vocabulary database that contains information about biomedical and health related concepts, their various names, and the relationships among them.

• Semantic Network: The Semantic Network provides a consistent categorization of all concepts represented in the UMLS Metathesaurus.

• SPECIALIST Lexicon and Lexical Tools: The SPECIALIST Lexicon and Lexical Tools are a set of software tools developed at the NLM to provide natural language processing (NLP) capabilities for the development of biomedical text processing applications.

Applications

The UMLS is used in a wide range of applications, including data mining, information retrieval, and patient record systems. It is also used in the development of Clinical Decision Support Systems and Health Information Exchange systems.

See also

• Medical Subject Headings
• Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine
• LOINC
• SNOMED CT

References

UMLS Resources
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