LinkBase® is unique in the marketplace as it has been continuously developed over 14 years creating a depth in the semantic linkages between concepts and a state of fine-tuning that can only come with time and dedicated experts. Another distinguishing feature is that LinkBase® was built from the beginning with NLP in mind in contrast to other medical ontologies currently available.

Medical language is used in a variety of different ways. Medical professionals in different locations, or even within the same hospital, use different expressions to indicate the same medical idea. So, if human beings don't completely understand each other, then maybe computers could be designed to understand medical language and process it in the most efficient and meaningful way. Just supporting medical data processing, classification systems as ICD-9, SNOMED, et al will not suffice.

Current coding classification systems have thousands of terms (e.g. about 20,000 for ICD-9-CM) in a one-dimensional hierarchical structure. However, for a computer to understand and process medical expressions, it needs a complete, multi-dimensional representation of the medical world where concepts are linked to each other via several types of relationships. This representation is called an ontology.

Language and Computing has developed a technology that breaks down medical language to a common denominator set of medical concepts that can be expressed both by standardized terminologies and by natural language expressions.

L&C has created the world’s largest medical content base totalling more than 1,000,000 concepts and over 7,000,000 knowledge objects! The LinKBase® Ontology is a formal conceptual description of the medical domain and as such is rendered machine-readable by a computer.

The medical concepts are language independent and are linked to about 3,000,000 terms in various languages (English, Spanish, French, etc.). Terms can be stored in different languages and can be linked to concepts, criteria and link types with an intersection table allowing L&C to define both homonyms (1 term that has several different meanings or linked concepts / criteria / link types) and synonyms (multiple terms associated with 1 concept/criteria/link type).

LinkBase® is the powerful foundation that drives all other L&C applications. It enables cross-mappings from one classification system to another (i.e. ICD-9-CM, ICD-10, SNOMED, Read, MedDRA, etc.); it accommodates searches in one language and information retrieval in another language; it optimizes indexing of medical documents based on their content, and it facilitates the extraction of medical facts, etc.