Health Terminology Management System

Mondeca & Health terminologies

Codification of medical information for use in digital health management systems (the e-Health domain) involves multiple issues:

Disambiguating and standardising medical information, too often expressed using natural language. Natural language also raises synonym and orthographic variants issues
Recording and exchanging normalised medical information and knowledge
Facilitating the structuring of the medical information and thus the information retrieval
Semantic interoperability for sharing medical information which potentially may be in different languages
Comparing, aggregating and reasoning on medical information
Coupling data and knowledge: biomedical literature, decision support …

To solve these issues, current Health Information Systems must take advantage of recent advances in knowledge representation and management areas such as the use of biomedical ontologies. Even if there have been recent advances in terminological servers, they still need to improve on:

Standardisation of terminological web services, such as the CTS2 proposal from the HL7 work group
Integration of these services in Health Information Systems to support the codification of medical information, to allow maintenance of the terminological resources and repositories, and to semantically annotate the biomedical contents (articles, patient folders, RCPs…)
Collaboration to build, maintain and translate large multilingual terminologies

The Intelligent Topic Manager “Terminologies, Taxonomies, Thesaurus” (ITM T3) Software Tool

Apart from being a multilingual terminologies and ontologies repository, ITM T3 is also a collaborative authoring tool. It supports:

collaborative work on terminologies/ontologies,
various search & browse options to ease the end-users search and retrieval work,
importing and exporting entire terminologies/ontologies or selected value sets in normalised formats,
mapping and aligning terms/concepts from different terminologies/ontologies,
multi-lingual translation of the terms/concepts,
publication of terminology/ontology versions,

ITM conforms to the Semantic Web standards, including XML, RDF, SKOS, and OWL recommendations. It is an open environment, and includes a collection of Java APIs and Web Services.

ITM can be enriched with a dedicated web portal application for terminology/ontology search/consultation. This user facing application includes a text search engine (such as Oracle, Fast, Exalead...) and optionally an RDF search engine for semantic queries into the terminology/ontology.

The Health Multi-Terminological Server (HMTS)

The Health Multi-Terminological Server (HMTS) proposed by Mondeca is a tool that facilitates the use of medical terminologies such as CIM10, CCAM, SNOMED, MeSH, LOINC etc. The access to these terminologies is in real time either through a web portal (for professional health end-users) or through a set of web services (for application agents). It can also be synchronised offline to update the health software with new or modified value sets from the terminologies.

It supports the following use cases:

Becoming the national platform for delivery of medical terminologies
Be an open platform capable of supporting the development of specialised services by e-Health actors and the industrial partners
Local installation in hospitals (integrating the solution in hospital information systems, customisation of the terminologies used by these information systems…)
Commercialising the services to finance the maintenance of the terminologies, the platform and all customized modules
Provision of free access to the public terminologies in normalised formats based on the Semantic Web recommendations (RDF, SKOS, URI)

Among the existing services (cf. Figure 1), the HMTS provide the means for the end-users to edit and manage each terminology (if they have the access rights to do so) but also to align and map terms from different terminologies.

The HMTS is currently developed and used in different research projects including:

InterSTIS Project, French TecSan Program – (2008, 2010)

Partners : Vidal, LERTIM, Mondeca, CISMeF, LIMSI, DSPIM, Memodata, HON, L@bstics
Enriching the HMTS
Aligning the terminologies based on medical semantics
Implementing new technical services
Designing and developing new HMTS-based services

VigiTermes Project , French TecSan Program – (2008, 2009)

Partenaires : SPIM, DSPIM, CRPV de l’HEGP, LIM&BIO, LORIA, TEMIS, Inalco, INSERM, EA3888

Pharmacovigilance support
- Obtaining a trusted information on adverse effects, promoting their earliest detection and based on validated reference data and on biomedical scientific articles
- Implementing a new platform for notifying and processing new adverse effects cases

Linked Data Project, on-going internal project

Bringing medical terminologies to the Semantic Web environment

Mondeca also has significant expertise in e-Health and medical information systems. We have worked on various projects in collaboration with various leaders in this domain:

Novartis in Innomed Project, directed by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industry and Associations (EFPIA): Improving the process of medecine development in Europe

Thomson-Scientific: Management of their biological terminologies to semantically annotate scientific abstracts

Industrial Partnerships

Vidal
Novartis
Thomson Scientific
PharmacoVigilance Regional Center (CRPV) – George Pompidou European Hospital (Paris)
WHO-UMC – World Health Organisation Uppsala Monitoring Centre for Drug Safety

Research Partnerships

CISMeF , LITIS EA4108 et Centre Hopitalier Universitaire (CHU) de Rouen
LERTIM, EA3283 – Faculté de Médecine de Marseille
INSERM, UMRS 872 eq20 – National Institut of Health and Medical Research – Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6)
SPIM – Research laboratory of Public Health and Medical Computer Sciences
DSPIM – Department of Public Health and Medical Informatics – Université de Saint-Etienne
LIM&BIO EA3969 – Research laboratory of Medical and Bio Computer Sciences –, Université Paris 13
EA3888 – Research laboratory of Conceptual Modelisation of Biomedical Knowledge – Université de Rennes

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