The use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) is increasingly popular in places like North America and Europe where western medicine is primarily practiced. pilot study investigated coverage of supplement databases to one another as well as coverage by the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and RxNorm for supplement terms. We found that none of the supplement databases completely covers supplement terms. UMLS MeSH SNOMED CT RxNorm and NDF-RT cover 54% 40 32 22 and 14% of Fludarabine (Fludara) supplement concepts respectively. NDF-RT provides some value for grouping supplements into drug classes. Enhancing our understanding of the gap between the traditional biomedical terminology systems and supplement terms could lead to the development of a comprehensive terminology resources for supplements and other secondary uses such as better detection and extraction of drug-supplement interactions. An Internet search was performed for the top herbal supplement databases to identify the included databases. The top results were then subject to further exclusion criteria. If databases were not based on evidence-based science they were rejected. For example Holistic heart health Healthline and WebMD’s databases were rejected for not having peer-reviewed sources. Databases with very few (<50) supplements were also rejected. Also one other database on the Dr. Oz's website was no longer available so that was excluded as well. Rxlist was also rejected since it merely mirrored NMCD's list. Finally the supplements were obtained from each qualified resource website: NSAD NMCD MedlinePlus Medscape and drugs.com. We extracted supplement terms from online databases and used these in our further analysis. Fludarabine (Fludara) We manually removed redundant non-English terms from the list of NSAD while keeping their corresponding English names. Step 3 3: To normalize supplement terms between different databases supplements were first mapped to UMLS Concept Unique Identifiers (CUIs) by using MetaMap – which then provides common meanings for the different sources of supplements. Only exact mapping with a score of 1000 were retained. Manual cleanup was performed to remove irrelevant mapping candidates. Semantic types such as ‘gene’ or ‘geographical area’ Rabbit polyclonal to ALKBH8. were eliminated before comparing the coverage between different databases. Irrelevant concepts after mapping were also excluded by manual review. When multiple CUIs were returned by MetaMap the most accurate CUIs were retained. For example when multiple CUIs were found for a single term the CUI corresponding to semantic type “plants” was retained over “extracts”. Supplement terms were also mapped to MeSH and SNOMED by restricting the terminology source in MetaMap in an effort to use multiple sources to normalize the databases. Before mapping we first implemented exact match for supplement terms and analyzed how frequent an individual term exists in each database. UMLS CUIs were then used to compare the coverage of supplements between five databases. We further generate a Venn diagram showing the coverage across databases using UMLS. After integrating concepts from all databases into a full list we also grouped UMLS concepts based on their semantic types. Analysis of supplements representation in RxNorm and NDF-RT To further investigate how RxNorm and NDF-RT represent supplements we first used RxMix functions to map terms of each database to RxNorm and NDF-RT concepts. RxMix is an NLM developed tool to allow users to combine all functions of RxNorm RxTerms and NDF-RT [19]. We then integrated all mapped RxNorm concepts into a respective list. To further investigate the detailed drug class information we used RxMix to analyze Fludarabine (Fludara) the integrated RxNorm concept list from all databases. Specifically we created such a workflow to identify the VA drug class for a given supplements string: where sinica stands for China. There is another species of Ephedra called named for the funeral mountains in the United States. Although UMLS had a broader coverage of supplement concepts RxNorm and NDF-RT Fludarabine (Fludara) as part of Fludarabine (Fludara) UMLS can provide more detailed information about medications including brand and generic name dosage drug class and interactions which is useful for finding.