Abstract
BackgroundThe Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) is the reference ontology regarding human anatomy. FMA vocabulary was integrated into the Health Multi Terminological Portal (HMTP) developed by CISMeF based on the CISMeF Information System which also includes 26 other terminologies and controlled vocabularies, mainly in French. However, FMA is primarily in English. In this context, the translation of FMA English terms into French could also be useful for searching and indexing French anatomy resources. Various studies have investigated automatic methods to assist the translation of medical terminologies or create multilingual medical vocabularies. The goal of this study was to facilitate the translation of FMA vocabulary into French.MethodsWe compare two types of approaches to translate the FMA terms into French. The first one is UMLS-based on the conceptual information of the UMLS metathesaurus. The second method is lexically-based on several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools.ResultsThe UMLS-based approach produced a translation of 3,661 FMA terms into French whereas the lexical approach produced a translation of 3,129 FMA terms into French. A qualitative evaluation was made on 100 FMA terms translated by each method. For the UMLS-based approach, among the 100 translations, 52% were manually rated as "very good" and only 7% translations as "bad". For the lexical approach, among the 100 translations, 47% were rated as "very good" and 20% translations as "bad".ConclusionsOverall, a low rate of translations were demonstrated by the two methods. The two approaches permitted us to semi-automatically translate 3,776 FMA terms from English into French, this was to added to the existing 10,844 French FMA terms in the HMTP (4,436 FMA French terms and 6,408 FMA terms manually translated).
Highlights
Biomedical terminologies and ontologies have proliferated during the past decade
We propose two approaches to automatically translate the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) from English into French: a knowledge-based approach that mainly relies on the Unified Medical Language System resources (UMLS®) [3], and Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach using the Multi-Terminolgical CISMeF Information System (CISMeF_IS) [2] that contains 27 terminologies
We examined the coverage of the translated FMA terms by considering the French terminologies and the terms from these terminologies in the UMLS Metathesaurus and in CISMeF_IS for the lexically-based approach
Summary
Biomedical terminologies and ontologies have proliferated during the past decade. Due to this proliferation, health care systems use different biomedical terminologies. Since 2005, we have decided to use the main health terminologies available in French for automatic indexing and information retrieval [2] In this context, the addition of new French terminologies would be useful, for instance through the translation of some or the many existing English language standards. Various studies have investigated automatic methods to assist the translation of medical terminologies or to create multilingual medical vocabularies Some of these methods use rewriting rules to translate biomedical terms: in [4] the authors proposed a method to translate biomedical terms from Portuguese into Spanish. The method proposed in [6] relies on an automatic process able to infer rewriting rules from examples These examples represent a list of paired terms in two studied languages (pair terms from Masson medical dictionary and from the UMLS metathesaurus). This UMLS-based approach was used in BabelMeSH [9] to automatically translate a query from French, Spanish and Portuguese into English to allow querying MEDLINE® via PubMed® with such languages
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