Using MetaMap Program to Map Medical Curriculum to MCC and One45 Controlled Vocabulary

Abstract

This project was undertaken in order to assist Dalhousie University’s UGME department in tracking the frequency at which particular concepts appear within its curriculum. Data was generated for the sake of analysis regarding the curriculum’s strengths and weaknesses in terms of which concepts are being taught or discussed too frequently, and which ones are not being introduced frequently enough. This project mapped the lectures, cases and labs of Med 1 to UMLS using the MetaMap program. The materials were then mapped to MCC concepts and One45 controlled vocabulary. Through this process, the author measured the frequency with which specific medical concepts appeared in Dalhousie University’s UGME curriculum. The main difficulty encountered was that not all of the concepts that appeared in the curriculum were mapped by the vocabularies employed. The author recommends using the MeSH vocabulary, in addition to MCC, in order to map the curriculum using a wider variety of concepts/terms. Mapping the curriculum with this broader vocabulary would result in improved precision. The author further recommends that Dalhousie University’s UGME department consider developing its own controlled vocabulary in order to map the concepts/terms in the UGME curriculum with even greater precision. Mapping the curriculum with greater precision would generate more reliable data for curriculum analysis. en_US