“…INTRODUCTION 1 Controlled medical terminologies have long played an important role in the drive to improve patient care, e.g., in Electronic Health Records (EHR), decision support and expert systems, medical literature databases, and data exchange [1], [2]. A large number of medical terminologies have been developed, including the Systemized Nomenclature of Medical Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) [3], the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 9th Revision -ICD-9 and more recently its 10th Revision, ICD-10 both with Clinical Modifications (CM) and Procedure Coding System (PCS) [4], [5], and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) thesaurus.…”