UMLS 2011AB Release Available

The 2011AB release of the Unified Medical Language System® (UMLS®) Knowledge Sources is available as of November 17, 2011 from the Downloads menu of the UMLS Terminology Services (UTS).

The new UMLS Release contains:

• More than 2.6 million concepts and 8.6 million unique concept names from 161 source vocabularies; the full Metathesaurus requires 23 GB of disk space
• One new translation
  • Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities Terminology (MedDRA), Hungarian Edition
• One new mapping file
  • ICNP_2011 to SNOMEDCT_2010_07_31 Mappings. The mapping is included as part of ICNP.
• 32 updated English sources and 11 updated translation sources including MeSH®, MedDRA, RxNorm, and SNOMED CT® (English and Spanish)
  
  

Data Changes

• Beginning with 2011AB, the Metathesaurus will not include 7-bit ASCII forms for Spanish terms. However, MetamorphoSys functionality allows you to convert non-ASCII characters to ASCII characters. During installation, enable the Unicode filter from the File menu and select your desired options.
• For sources that have Relationship Groups (RG field in MRREL.RRF), a null value is assigned to the RG field for the inverse of that relationship.
  
  

Gene Ontology

• Gene Ontology (GO) now includes Relationship Groups that represent the "has_intersection" relationships.
  
  

SNOMED CT

• The Metathesaurus includes the Release Format 1 (RF1) version of the July 2011 International Release of SNOMED CT. For information on RF1 and Release Format 2 (RF2), see Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) News for August 2011.
  
  

MeSH

• The Metathesaurus does not include 2012 MeSH changes made after July 2011.
  
  

RxNorm

• Tall Man Lettering synonym: TTY="TMSY" has been added. This term type is used to distinguish between commonly confused ingredients and brand names, such as 'predniSONE' and 'prednisoLONE'.
• New attribute name: ATN="RXN_PRESCRIBABLE" has been added. It denotes the RxCUIs that are part of the Current Prescribable Content subset. Its attribute value is Y (ATV=“Y”).
• To learn more about the Current Prescribable Content subset in RxNorm, see the UMLS Webcast "An Update of RxNorm".
  
  

Release Information

For more information about the release, see the What's New, Updated Sources, and Statistics sections of the Release Documentation.

To access the UMLS Release files, you must have an active UMLS Metathesaurus® License and a valid UTS account. You will be prompted for your UTS username and password when downloading the files.

Additional information regarding the UMLS is available on the UMLS homepage. New users are encouraged to take the UMLS Basics Tutorial and to explore the new UMLS Quick Start Guide, training materials and other information on the New Users homepage.

DVDs

As always, the production and mailing of the UMLS DVDs occur about four weeks after the release is made available for download.

To request or cancel a DVD: Sign in to the UTS and edit your UTS profile to select or deselect the DVD option.

Source Release Documentation
2011AB Source Release Documentation Web pages will be published following the release.

By Victoria Wilder
MEDLARS Management Section

Wilder V. UMLS® 2011AB Release Available. NLM Tech Bull. 2011 Nov-Dec;(383):e3.