How does RELMA’s Intelligent Mapper work?
The Intelligent Mapper (IM), is an automated tool within RELMA for producing a ranked list of candidate LOINC terms for each local term in a submission file. IM identifies candidate LOINC codes by counting the number of matches between words in the local term name and words (or synonyms) in the formal LOINC term names. Before doing the matching, it expands the words in the local term name into a tree of synonyms. For example, “CHEST MRA” becomes “CHEST, (MRI ANGIO, MRA).” IM counts exact-string word matches for all possible combinations of words and synonyms (e.g., “CHEST, MRI ANGIO” and “CHEST, MRA” are counted separately), and then uses the best count as the first part of its match score. IM ranks the candidate LOINC terms for relevance first by the number of words matched (the more the better), and second on the total number of words in the LOINC term (the fewer the better). If no words in the local term match to any in LOINC, IM does not return any candidate terms.
