Perceiving the Usefulness of the National Cancer Institute Metathesaurus for Enriching NCIt with Topological Patterns

The National Cancer Institute Thesaurus (NCIt), developed and maintained by the National Cancer Institute, is an important reference terminology in the cancer domain. As a controlled terminology needs to continuously incorporate new concepts to enrich its conceptual content, automated and semi-automated methods for identifying potential new concepts are in high demand. We have previously developed a topological-pattern-based method for identifying new concepts in a controlled terminology to enrich another terminology, using the UMLS Metathesaurus. In this work, we utilize this method with the National Cancer Institute Metathesaurus to identify new concepts for NCIt. While previous work was only oriented towards identifying candidate import concepts for human review, we are now also adding an algorithmic method to evaluate candidate concepts and reject a well defined group of them.