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Biomedical subjects

Suresh Srinivasan

Publications and source records attributed to Suresh Srinivasan.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2004

Achieving "source transparency" in the UMLS Metathesaurus.

The UMLS Metathesaurus is a syntactically uniform, concept-based, semantically enhanced representation of many of the world's authoritative biomedical vocabularies. Released several times a year, the Metathesaurus is becoming a common, longitudinally maintained source of the current versions of these vocabularies. As vocabularies become standards for reimbursement, reporting, interoperation, and use by applications, the vocabulary obtained from the Metathesaurus must be consistent with that obtainable from each vocabulary's authority. Effective with the first 2004 release, the Metathesaurus represents new and updated sources "transparently"--both users and applications are able to "see" each vocabulary in the Metathesaurus without any of the small losses of information introduced by abstractions used in previous versions. Thus, the Metathesaurus can continue to provide its many semantic and lexical value-added features while guaranteeing that original sources will be "visible" in intact form. Vocabulary users and application developers will benefit from the enhancements and economies of scale offered by the Metathesaurus, while preserving distinctions between content provided by external authorities and content added as part of the Metathesaurus development and maintenance process.

Unified Medical Language System↗
PubMed2003

Constrained optimization for green engineering decision-making.

Green engineering requires the designer to consider a very extensive set of environmental impacts. To minimize these impacts, the designer must significantly expand his or her "toolset" of product design concepts, alternative materials, manufacturing systems, and analytic methods for addressing life cycle impacts. This can overwhelm a designer, who then resorts to overly simplistic rules or checklists out of necessity. The central issue is how to identify all "pollution prevention pays" opportunities and then how to deal with the unavoidable tradeoffs that arise after all these opportunities have been exhausted. This paper presents a framework for employing mathematical decision modeling toward this end. A domain-independent constrained optimization formulation is presented. A multiattribute utility function reflects the willingness to pay for environmental improvement and is the basis of the objective function. The feasibility constraints reflect the unavoidable tradeoffs. Several case studies are presented, including power systems, floor tile manufacturing, and computer systems.

Computers↗
PubMed2002

Tracking meaning over time in the UMLS Metathesaurus.

The Unified Medical Language System(R) (UMLS) Metathesaurus contains records arranged by concept or meaning. Each concept contains a unique identifier (CUI) that can be used to track the concept over time. Since the January 2001 release, the Metathesaurus has included the file MRCUI that contains mappings for CUIs that disappear. This paper describes the processes that facilitated this effort and the ongoing effort to find suitable mappings for concepts whose meanings no longer exist in the Metathesaurus. This study highlights the need to identify missed synonymy prior to a release. It also shows a need to work more closely with source providers to identify the closest match in the Metathesaurus when they eliminate terms from their vocabularies.

National Library of Medicine (U.S.)↗
PubMed2002

Finding UMLS Metathesaurus concepts in MEDLINE.

The entire collection of 11.5 million MEDLINE abstracts was processed to extract 549 million noun phrases using a shallow syntactic parser. English language strings in the 2002 and 2001 releases of the UMLS Metathesaurus were then matched against these phrases using flexible matching techniques. 34% of the Metathesaurus names (occurring in 30% of the concepts) were found in the titles and abstracts of articles in the literature. The matching concepts are fairly evenly chemical and non-chemical in nature and span a wide spectrum of semantic types. This paper details the approach taken and the results of the analysis.

MEDLINE↗
PubMed2002

Integration of a standard gastrointestinal endoscopy terminology in the UMLS Metathesaurus.

MST(c), a standard terminology for gastrointestinal endoscopy reporting, was integrated in the January 2002 UMLS Metathesaurus in order to ease the practical interoperability of clinical data repositories in gastroenterology. The integration required full specification of names, resolution of discrepancies between English, French and Italian versions of MST, appropriate categorization with UMLS Semantic Types and MST-level Class attributes, assignment of explicit intra-table (and some useful inter-table) relationships mainly at concept level but also at the source level in order to retain and fully represent the original explicit and implicit MST organization. Main results, problems encountered and future plans are discussed.

Endoscopy, Gastrointestinal↗