Using a Cross-Language Approach to Acquire New Mappings between Two Biomedical Terminologies

The exploitation of clinical reports for generating alerts especially relies on the alignment of the dedicated terminologies, i.e., MedDRA (exploited in the pharmacovigilance area) and SNOMED International (exploited recently in France for encoding clinical documents). In this frame, we propose a crosslanguage approach for acquiring automatically alignments between terms from MedDRA and SNOMED International. We had the hypothesis that using additional languages could be helpful to complement the mappings obtained between French terms. Our approach is based on a lexical method for aligning MedDRA terms to those from SNOMED International. The concomitant use of multiple languages resulted in several hundreds of new alignments and successfully validated or disambiguated some of these alignments.