Using ISO and Semantic Web standards for creating a Multilingual Medical Interface Terminology : A use case for Hearth Failure.

The correct registration and encoding of medical data in Electronic Health Records is still a major challenge for health care professionals. Efficient terminological systems are lacking to enable multilingual semantic interoperability between general practitioners, patients, medical specialists, and allied health personnel. The aim of this paper is to propose an architectural structure for a Multilingual Medical Interface Terminology. We propose a dual structure with a multilingual reference terminology and a collection of unilingual end-user lexicons. Our methods rely on terminological standards, such as Terminology Markup Framework (ISO 16642) and Lexical Markup Framework (ISO 24613), and on Semantic Web technologies. We present procedures to select words, phrases, and concepts to populate these resources (manual concept extraction, automated term extraction), to link them to NLP applications and international classifications. We present the publication of these resources in Linked Open Data and show the feasibility in a use related to heart failure. We illustrate in particular the difficulties in linking real life concepts (N=168) to multiple international classifications with different functionalities, level of granularity, and scopes. The expansion of entries (from 77 to 298) in the lexicon is shown, when lay term synonyms are considered and decomposing of phrases is performed.