A Preliminary Evaluation of the UMLS Metathesaurus for Patient Record Classification

The UMLS project seeks to provide a unified interface to biomedical knowledge resources. Patient medical records are an enormous repository of clinical intervention and outcome, and are drawing increasing attention in the pursuit of quality assurance, outcomes research, and epidemiologic analysis. We sought to evaluate an unedited version of the preliminary UMLS Metathesaurus, Meta-1, for the automated coding of medical diagnosis and surgical procedures. Identical evaluations were undertaken using SNOMED and the Mayo Clinic indexing lexicon. Meta-1 performed comparably to the comparison clinical indexing systems, although all systems exhibited problems associated with clinical attribute levels and modifier combinations.