An Iconic Approach to the Browsing of Medical Terminologies

Medical terminologies are the basis of interoperability in medicine. They allow connecting the various systems and data and facilitate searches in databases. An example is the MedDRA terminology, used in particular for coding drug adverse events. However, these terminologies are often complex and involve a huge number of terms. Consequently, it is difficult to browse them or find the desired terms. Traditional approaches consist of lexical search, with the problems of synonymy and polysemy, or tree-based navigation, but the user often gets "lost" in the tree. Here, we propose a new approach for browsing medical terminologies: the use of pictograms and icons, for formulating the query in complement to a textual search box, and for displaying the search results. We applied this approach to the MedDRA terminology. We present both the methods and search algorithms and the resulting browsing interface, as well as the qualitative opinions of two pharmacovigilance experts.