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Overview of the NCI Metathesaurus (NCIm)

NCI Metathesaurus (NCIm) is a wide-ranging biomedical terminology database that covers most terminologies used by NCI for clinical care, translational and basic research, and public information and administrative activities.

The database contains 1,400,000 concepts mapped to 3,600,000 terms with 17,000,000 relationships. NCI Metathesaurus NCIm contains most public domain vocabularies from the National Library of Medicine's UMLS Metathesaurus, as well as a growing number of other biomedical vocabularies. Some propriety vocabularies are included, and have restrictions on their use.

NCIm is intended to provide rich synonymy and is useful in mapping among the codes and terms used in various biomedical vocabularies. In contrast the NCI Thesaurus (NCIt) is the NCI reference vocabulary that provides the concepts used in caCORE and caBIG® to establish data semantics.

NCI Metathesaurus NCIm is registered in the HL7 OID Registry as 2.16.840.1.113883.3.26.1.2 .

The NCI Metathesaurus NCIm is updated monthly. The monthly updates correspond to minor software releases. They contain new or modified concepts, spelling corrections and other minor changes.

EVS produces two or three "builds" of the NCI Metathesaurus NCIm each year, each roughly corresponding to a major release of a software product. Each build is based on created using the most recent release of the UMLS Metathesaurus, supplemented with dropping some old and restricted sources, adding many NCI-specific vocabulary sources.In EVS, a vocabulary build corresponds roughly to a major release of a software product. Builds may contain wholly new sources; existing sources may be dropped or supplanted. , and following NCI editorial policies.  The availability of new builds, and the differences between builds, are announced on the NCI EVS list server.

In addition to the NCI Metathesaurus NCIm and the NCI ThesaurusNCIt, the EVS servers provide access to a variety of other vocabulary products such as SNOMED/MedDRA, CTCAE, GO, ICD-9-CM, RadLex, SNOMED CT, LOINC and VA/ NDF-RT.

Using the NCI Metathesaurus Wiki

This is the wiki home page for NCI Metathesaurus. caCORE developers may edit this page and any user may add a comment.  Comments and suggestions can also be emailed to the NCIm team at NCIMetathesaurus@mail.nih.gov.

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