Assisting the translation of SNOMED CT into French using UMLS and four representative French-language terminologies.

Objective: To provide a semantics-based method to assist the translation of SNOMED CT into French. To do so, we selected four French-language terminologies: ICD-10, SNOMED International, MedDRA, MeSH, as they are dedicated to different uses - epidemiology, clinical medicine, adverse reactions, medical literature, respectively - in order to map them to SNOMED Clinical Terms (CT), and thus associate French terms with SNOMED CT concepts. In this way, we measured the number of SNOMED CT concepts to be found in French-language terminologies.

Material And Method: We used the UMLS Metathesaurus. The mapping method was based on the coincidence of identifiers and on the explicit mappings present in the Metathesaurus.

Results: The study dealt exclusively with preferred terms (PTs) in the terminologies. The terminologies are mapped with varying success as regards PTs mapped to SNOMED terms (from 52% to 96%). Conversely, 45% of SNOMED CT terms are mapped by uniting the four terminologies.

Discussion: A more effective mapping technique than the current method is under consideration.

Conclusion: The method presented will be refined. It could certainly provide useful assistance in the translation of SNOMED CT into French. Due to its general nature, it could be used to translate SNOMED CT into other languages than French.