Identifying anatomical concepts associated with ICD10 diseases

Unlike recent biomedical terminologies, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) does not state any explicit associations between a given disease and the corresponding anatomical structure(s). As a consequence, clinical repositories coded with ICD cannot be searched by anatomical structure. The objective of this work is to find associations between diseases from ICD10 and anatomical structures. Toward this end, we investigated three approaches (symbolic, lexical, and statistical) which exploit various features of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). We evaluated these approaches according to i) the consistency of resulting anatomical concepts with the high-level anatomical concept(s) identified for the chapter in which the disease is listed; and ii) the validity of resulting anatomical concepts assessed manually. We show that the symbolic approach is both the most productive and the most accurate approach.