  VCM (Visualization of Concept in Medicine) is an iconic language for
representing key medical concepts by icons. However, the use of this language
with reference terminologies, such as SNOMED CT, will require the mapping of
its icons to the terms of these terminologies. Here, we present and evaluate a
semi-automatic semantic method for the mapping of SNOMED CT concepts to VCM
icons. Both SNOMED CT and VCM are compositional in nature; SNOMED CT is
expressed in description logic and VCM semantics are formalized in an OWL
ontology. The proposed method involves the manual mapping of a limited number
of underlying concepts from the VCM ontology, followed by automatic generation
of the rest of the mapping. We applied this method to the clinical findings of
the SNOMED CT CORE subset, and 100 randomly-selected mappings were evaluated by
three experts. The results obtained were promising, with 82 of the SNOMED CT
concepts correctly linked to VCM icons according to the experts. Most of the
errors were easy to fix.
