Automatic Mapping tool of local laboratory terminologies to LOINC

Clinical concepts and terminologies usually differ from one software system to another, making the exchange of data between them a very arduous and difficult task. It mainly involves finding the correspondences between the local identifiers of the concepts to be exchanged. In this paper, we describe a software tool called SAM (Automatic Mapping System), a tool for terminological normalization of laboratory tests to LOINC. SAM helps technicians in this task through simplification of the terminological mapping process. It uses approximate string matching techniques along with a thorough mining of previous mappings and LOINC parts.