Patent ID: 7912864

Claim:
A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing computer executable instructions that when executed by a computer cause the computer to perform a method, the method comprising: defining a plurality of terms for use in conjunction with a medical study where the terms are stored according to a series of relations and the relations corresponding to the terms indicate an association from a term to at least one other of the plurality of terms; defining a primary level of medical relations for at least one group of terms taken from the plurality of terms and storing the at least one group of terms, including the relations corresponding to each term; providing a match term defined by the group of terms; defining a secondary level of medical relations including a plurality of category terms to be associated with one or more of the plurality of terms, where defining the secondary level of medical relations includes defining broad scope relation links and narrow scope relation links between the match term and the at least one group of terms taken from the plurality of terms, and where defining the secondary level of relations includes defining relationships between the match term and at least one term taken from the at least one group of terms that have no obvious linguistic relationship to each other; mapping one or more terms from the plurality of terms to a category term, where the one or more terms do not share a relationship link with other one or more terms from the plurality of terms but with the category term; querying a memory of data from the study to find occurrences of the category term as defined by the secondary level of relations of the mapped terms.