About UMLS

Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a combination of various biomedical ontologies. One of them is Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), which are used to annotate PubMED articles. Julian Szymanski and our group constructed a Java applet that uses TouchGraph technology to visualize parent-child relationships between MeSH concepts. The applet allows you to browse the ontology up and down for more than one concept at a time.

System Requirements

The applet uses Java version 5 or higher. If necessary, download the latest Java.

Using the Visualizer

Concept names need to be put in square brackets for separation. If a concept is composed of multiple words, the words need to be sorted alphabetically.

Here are some example queries:

[pneumonia] - relations for one concept

[pneumonia] [lung] - relations for two concepts simultaneously

[pneumonia] [pneumonia viral] - second concept has two words and they are sorted alphabetically; relations for those two concepts might merge into one tree

Note

At first the applet displays phrases mapped to concepts. Some phrases may not be mapped. If they are, you can see the relations by double-clicking the concept (clicking the phrase does not do anything).