About InterSTIS

The objective of this project is to make interoperable the main French medical terminologies within a “multisource terminology server” (STMS). STMS is a durable service, managed by a consortium, and at actors of public health disposal as a component of indexing services and of accessing medical and pharmacological information .

The increasing number of documents related to citizens health poses today the problem of indexing and retrieving them in large databases. Indexing is made today thanks to MeSH. Teams of the domain have developed automated indexing tools for French that will reach the same capabilities than those developed for English. MeSH should not be the only terminology. If we aim at indexing other types of documents than teaching or documentary documents, we must be capable to index clinical reports, exam reports, mails, etc. Terminologies are at this time used for that: SNOMED for clinical information, CIM-10 and CCAM for economic coding, CISP for general practitioners, and others. The aim of the current project is to integrate them and make them interoperable within a multisource terminology server (STMS). An important part must be given to “patient-oriented” terminologies. It is true that non expert users are more and more consumers of health information. This kind of terminologies would provide equivalent lay people’ terms to specialized ones.

[TRADUCTION A CONFIRMER] The goal of InterSTIS project is to make interoperable the main French medical terminologies such as SNOMED for clinical information coding, CCAM for economic coding, ICPC for general practioners, MeSH for bibliography, and other proprietary terminologies.

The development of such a STMS implies : a unified terminological base, mappings between resources (semantic mediation), standardisation by the means of a mainspring format or meta-model, and tools for maintenance. Then the services allowed to users and applications will help health professionals to index various kinds of documents according to the related terminologies, and help every kind of users to retrieve information and data. Even if some of these terminologies are actually integrated in the UMLS [7], it is the case of SNOMED, CIM-10 and CISP, or within foreign servers, it is the case of CCAM in the Galen Terminology Server [8], any French terminology server makes them interoperable today. CISMeF team developed in 2006 a mono-terminology server based on MeSH [9] allowing to translate, for instance, a request from French to English with the intent to query Pubmed.

3 commentaires sur “About InterSTIS”

  1. ustun bedirhan dit :
    9 février 2010 à 11:05

    Very good initiative –
    1.it will be good to link with ICD revision process
    2. it will be good to explain the linkage to French SNOMED CT ( currently it is not mentioned at all – unless I miss it…)

  2. S.Pereira dit :
    9 février 2010 à 12:27

    1. I think you are talking about ICD11. In fact, one of our partners is involved in the ICD11 developpment so we can follow up this project and ajust our approachs.
    2. There is no « French » SNOMED CT. SNOMED CT is not yet translated into French that is why we are using SNOMED Int which has a French version.

  3. M.Joubert dit :
    9 février 2010 à 15:38

    France has not yet joined the IHTSDO. But, some of French and Canadian organizations work on the possible translation of SNOMED CT into French. They are Inforoute (Infoway) in Canada and a French consortium grouped around the InterSTIS project :
    Joubert M, Abdoune H, Merabti T, Darmoni S, Fieschi M. Assisting the Translation of SNOMED CT into French using UMLS and four Representative French-language Terminologies. Proc. AMIA 2009: 291-5.
    Some French representatives are currently visiting Canadian organizations to envisage a possible collaboration in this way.
    Michel JOUBERT
    mjoubert@ap-hm.fr