Automated translation between medical vocabularies using a frame-based interlingua.

The integration of clinical systems almost always requires a translation phase, where vocabularies are compared and the similar concepts are matched. The lack of standards in the area of medical concept representation makes this task very difficult. The authors describe the development of a frame-based application that automatically translates terms found in one vocabulary to another. The application implements an innovative scoring algorithm that ranks the best matches using an exponential scale. Preliminary results and the comparison against a manual process in the same domain are also discussed.