Medical Concept Normalization

Medical concept normalization, which maps clinical entities to concepts in standard terminology, is essential for supporting downstream computational applications in clinical settings. This chapter starts with an overview of existing biomedical terminologies and ontologies, elucidating their pivotal roles within diverse biomedical NLP systems. Then a comprehensive exploration of medical concept normalization approaches, including traditional rule-based methodologies as well as contemporary machine learning and deep learning-based techniques, are introduced. Moreover, this chapter extends its utility by presenting a compendium of available resources, including shared tasks and annotated corpora specifically tailored to concept normalization, to empower and streamline the endeavors of readers engaged in this specialized field of research.