MeTMapS-Medical terminology mapping system

Motivation: Medical terminology mapping is a long-standing challenge for projects requiring retrieval, querying and integration of heterogeneous patient data. Current tools fail to fully utilise the richness of the underlying coding systems, and can be difficult to install and maintain. For example, National Library of Medicine's UMLS provides a rich collection of terminology mapping, however, its search results are displayed in a simplistic general purpose interface that cannot easily be navigated and results filtered according to user's preferences. Specifically, returned results cannot be visualised in a tree to show positions and relationships. BioPortal offers a large number of terminologies and ontologies, each of which can be viewed in a tree structure, however it does not allow for multiple ontologies to be viewed and compared on a single page. Our work aims to address these issues and provide a simple and easy to use terminology mapping software. Results: MeTMapS was evaluated with academic and clinical research users. The users have tested the mapping between ICD10, Read CTV2, V3 in Hypertension. It was also tested on a list of clinical terms from the inclusion and exclusion criteria of the INFORM clinical trial protocol. Our initial evaluation produced positive results. Availability: We are currently in the process of updating the design based on some improvements suggested by the participants. MeTMapS is developed under Apache V2 license and is currently hosted at KCL for internal use and will shortly be opened to the public once the internal security concerns are resolved. In the meantime, the tool is available from the author upon request.