Automated translation between medical terminologies using semantic definitions.

Automatic translation of medical terms from one controlled vocabulary into another is essential to the integration of diverse medical informatics systems. We have developed a strategy in which medical terms are represented in a standard format that provides semantic description of the terms. We demonstrate the representational power of our method by showing that a subset of medical terms (procedures) from diverse vocabularies can be described in this manner. We assess the potential usefulness of our approach for facilitating automatic translation by finding the closest match for MeSH cardiovascular procedures with ICD-9 procedures.