Consistency across the hierarchies of the UMLS semantic network and Metathesaurus
Consistency across the hierarchies of the UMLS semantic network and Metathesaurus
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DOI：
10.1016/j.jbi.2003.11.001
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发表时间：
2003-12-01
影响因子：
4.5
通讯作者：
Perl, Y
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Cimino, JJ;Min, H;Perl, Y
Objective.为了开发和测试一种方法，用于自动检测元词库中的父子关系与统一医学语言系统（UMLS）语义网络中的祖先-后代关系之间的不一致。我们利用了这样一个事实，即每个元词库概念被分配一个或多个语义类型从UMLS语义网络和语义类型的层次结构中排列。我们比较了每对父概念和子概念的语义类型，以确定是否“解释”元词库的类型是关系。我们认为，如果父项的语义类型既不与子项的语义类型相同，也不是其祖先，则这种情况是“无法解释的”。“我们将这种方法应用于2002年1月发布的UMLS，并检查了我们发现的无法解释的病例，以确定其原因。我们发现，17,022（24.3%）的父母-孩子是一个关系在UMLS元词库无法解释的基础上的语义类型的概念。这些差异的原因包括父或子缺少语义类型的情况下，子的语义类型太一般或父的语义类型太具体的情况下，父-子关系不正确的情况下，以及祖先-后代关系应该添加到UMLS语义网络的情况下。在许多情况下，没有UMLS开发人员的权威判断，无法解决差异的具体原因。我们的方法成功地检测UMLS元词库和语义网络的层次结构之间的不一致。我们相信我们的方法应该被添加到UMLS开发人员用来维护和审核UMLS知识源的工具中。(C)2003年爱思唯尔公司All rights reserved.
Objective. To develop and test a method for automatically detecting inconsistencies between the parent-child is-a relationships in the Metathesaurus and the ancestor-descendant relationships in the Semantic Network of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS).Methods. We exploited the fact that each Metathesaurus concept is assigned one or more semantic types from the UMLS Semantic Network and that the semantic types are arranged in a hierarchy. We compared the semantic types of each pair of parent and child concepts to determine if the types "explained" the Metathesaurus is-a relationships. We considered cases where the semantic type of the parent was neither the same as, nor an ancestor of, the semantic type of the child to be "unexplained." We applied this method to the January 2002 release of the UMLS and examined the unexplained cases we discovered to determine their causes.Results. We found that 17,022 (24.3%) of the parent-child is-a relationships in the UMLS Metathesaurus could not be explained based on the semantic types of the concepts. Causes for these discrepancies included cases where the parent or child was missing a semantic type, cases where the semantic type of the child was too general or the semantic type of the parent was too specific, cases where the parent-child relationship was incorrect, and cases where an ancestor-descendant relationship should be added to the UMLS Semantic network. In many cases, the specific cause of the discrepancy cannot be resolved without authoritative judgment by the UMLS developers.Conclusions. Our method successfully detects inconsistencies between the hierarchies of the UMLS Metathesaurus and Semantic Network. We believe that our method should be added to the set of tools that the UMLS developers use to maintain and audit the UMLS knowledge sources. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.