Patent ID: 7672987

Claim:
A computer implemented method for integrating medical information using the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) as a hierarchical tree-structured taxonomy of medical terms, comprising the steps of: providing a source ontology and a target ontology, said ontologies comprising formalizations of domain concepts associated with a medical terminological vocabulary, each concept being associated with data, each said ontology being distinct from the UMLS; learning concept classifiers for said source and target ontologies from training data; forming associations that map elements between the source and target ontology using the UMLS and said concept classifiers, wherein associated source ontology elements and target ontology elements are mapped to a same UMLS concept, wherein forming associations comprises the steps of: providing an ontology; initializing a test concept with a root concept of said ontology; initializing a current UMLS concept with a root concept of UMLS; classifying said test concept using the data associated with said test concept against all UMLS concepts at the hierarchy level of said current concept; selecting a best UMLS concept from said hierarchy level that has a best classification of said test concept; determining whether the data associated with said test concept can be better classified with any child concept of said best UMLS concept, wherein if said test concept cannot be better classified with any child concept of said best UMLS concept, associating said test concept to said best UMLS concept, and if said test concept can be better classified with a child concept of said best UMLS concept, reinitializing the current UMLS concept with said child UMLS concept that better classifies the data associated with said test concept, and repeating said steps of classifying said test concept, selecting a best UMLS concept, and determining whether the test data can be better classified with a child concept until either said current UMLS concept is a leaf UMLS concept or said test concept cannot be better classified to any children of the current UMLS concept; ranking said associations in terms of a number of source and target concepts to which each UMLS concept is mapped; and presenting a predefined number of highest ranked associations to a user, wherein the steps of providing a source ontology and a target ontology, learning concept classifiers, forming associations, ranking said associations, and presenting associations to a user, are performed by a computer processor.