Description: UMLS consists of three parts: Metathesaurus, Semantic Network and SPECIALIST Lexicon. The Metathesaurus forms the base of the UMLS and comprises over 1 million biomedical concepts and 5 million concept names, all of which stem from the over 100 incorporated controlled vocabularies and classification systems. Additional information: The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a comprehensive set of databases and software tools developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) to facilitate the development of computer systems that process biomedical text. The UMLS project, initiated in 1986, aims to overcome two significant challenges to the use of computers in medicine: the variety of ways the same concepts are expressed in different computer systems and in the scientific literature, and the difficulty of keeping up with the rapid growth of biomedical knowledge. The UMLS integrates and distributes key terminology, classification and coding standards, and associated resources to promote the creation of more effective and interoperable biomedical information systems and services, including electronic health records. It provides a unified approach to the complex biomedical terminology landscape by integrating over 200 different vocabularies and classifications used in health care, public health, and biomedical research. The UMLS consists of three main components: 1. The Metathesaurus: This is the largest component of the UMLS. It contains information about biomedical and health related concepts, their various names, and the relationships among them. It is built from the electronic versions of many different thesauri, classifications, code sets, and lists of controlled terms used in patient care, health services billing, public health statistics, biomedical literature indexing and cataloging, and health services research. 2. The Semantic Network: This provides a consistent categorization of all concepts represented in the UMLS Metathesaurus and a set of useful relationships between these concepts. It consists of a set of broad categories, called semantic types, which are assigned to each concept in the Metathesaurus, and a set of relationships, called semantic relations, that exist between the semantic types. 3. The SPECIALIST Lexicon and Lexical Tools: These provide information about the lexical characteristics of the Metathesaurus strings and a set of programs that use this information to provide various language processing functions. The UMLS is designed to enhance the retrieval and integration of biomedical information from a variety of machine-readable information sources, including descriptions of medical literature articles, clinical records, factual databanks, rule-based expert systems, and patient management systems. It is used by researchers, healthcare providers, institutions and IT developers to enhance health information systems and improve patient care and research. Example: 1. Clinical Decision Support Systems: UMLS can be used in the development of clinical decision support systems. These systems can use the UMLS to understand and interpret medical terminology, enabling them to provide more accurate and relevant recommendations to healthcare providers. 2. Electronic Health Records: UMLS can be used to standardize the terminology used in electronic health records. This can make it easier for healthcare providers to understand and interpret patient information, even if it was originally recorded using different terminology. 3. Medical Research: Researchers can use the UMLS to help them understand and interpret medical literature. This can make it easier for them to identify relevant studies and extract useful information from them. 4. Health Information Exchange: UMLS can be used to facilitate the exchange of health information between different healthcare systems. By standardizing the terminology used, it can ensure that information is accurately and consistently interpreted, regardless of the system it originated from. 5. Telemedicine: In telemedicine, UMLS can be used to interpret and understand medical data and terminology. This can help healthcare providers to provide accurate and effective care to patients remotely. 6. Medical Education: UMLS can be used in medical education to help students understand and learn medical terminology. It can also be used to develop educational resources and tools. 7. Natural Language Processing: UMLS can be used in natural language processing applications in healthcare, such as voice recognition systems or chatbots. These applications can use the UMLS to understand and interpret medical terminology, enabling them to interact more effectively with users. 8. Pharmacovigilance: UMLS can be used to standardize and interpret the terminology used in drug safety reports. This can make it easier to identify potential safety issues and take appropriate action. LOST view: TVA-Health Technical Agreements Identifier: http://data.europa.eu/dr8/egovera/UMLS-UnifiedMedicalLanguageSystemContract EIRA traceability: eira:TechnicalAgreementContract EIRA concept: eira:SolutionBuildingBlock Last modification: 2023-08-04 dct:identifier: http://data.europa.eu/dr8/egovera/UMLS-UnifiedMedicalLanguageSystemContract dct:title: UMLS - Unified Medical Language System Contract