Towards a Multilingual Version of Terminologia Anatomica Paul Fabry, Robert Baud, Christian Lovis Service d’Informatique Médicale, Hôpital Universitaire de Genève, Suisse Abstract: Objective: Terminologia Anatomica (TA) is the new standard in anatomical terminology. This terminology is available only in Latin and English and its worldwide adoption is subdued to the addition of terms from others languages. On the other hand Nomina Anatomica (NA), the previous standard, has been widely translated. Aim of this work was to append foreign terms to TA by using similarity matching algorithm between its Latin terms and those from NA. Methods: A semi-automatic matching of Latin terms from TA with those of NA was performed using a string-to-string distance algorithm and manual assessment. We used a French – Latin version of NA together with TA and we suggested French terms for TA. Coverage was evaluated by the number of exact and approximate matches. A target of 80% was set due to the superior number of terms in TA compared to NA. Relevance was estimated by manually comparing the meanings of the English and French terms related to the same Latin term. The question was whether they refer to the same anatomical structure. Results: Exact or approximate matches were found for 5,982 terms (76.5%) of TA. Our results outlined that more than 75% of the terms from TA came from NA, most of them were left unchanged and all were used with the same meaning. Conclusion: This method produces relevant results, reaching our 80% target. The method is based only on Latin terms and can be used for other languages and for others terminologies including Latin terms. Keywords: Anatomy, Terminologia Anatomica, Nomina Anatomica, Terminology mapping, French language 1. Introduction The advancement of human anatomy took centuries and occurred in many countries, each using its own language. It was estimated that there were some 50,000 anatomical terms in use at the end of the 19 th century but they applied only to some 5,000 to 6,000 structures [1]. Not only several terms were related to the same structure (synonyms) but one term could be used to name different structures (homonyms) depending on its author. In addition, many of these terms were eponyms, i.e. terms including a proper noun. In order to overcome this obstacle, the International Federation of Associations of Anatomists (IFAA) led to the publication of the first international terminology of anatomy, the Nomina Anatomica, (NA, [2]) in 1955. NA included a list of 5,640 Latin terms related to the macroscopic anatomy, to be translated into existing languages. From 1955 to 1989, NA had six editions with additions in embryology (Nomina Embryologica) and histology (Nomina Histologica) but with only minor modifications in anatomy compared to the original version. Meanwhile, the advances in medicine, Connecting Medical Informatics and Bio-Informatics R. Engelbrecht et al. (Eds.) ENMI, 2005 665 Section 9: Terminologies, Ontologies, Standards and Knowledge Engineering