RESUMO
Anatomy, the study of human structure, is foundational to medicine. Its language has a long history, with contributions from authors hailing from diverse cultures and countries, adhering to various scientific traditions, speaking different languages, and practicing medicine across a wide gamut of specialties. The resultant disparity in terms provides challenges both for students in learning and for interdisciplinary communication. We report here on a user-friendly look-up web site, "AnatomicalTerms.info" that links a Terminologica Anatomica term to alternative terms in usage: synonyms, polysemes, eponyms, homonyms, and terms in other languages. Accompanying open-source definitions are generated with the help of "Definition Machine" software, that supports creating the most concise and accessible definitions for anatomical terms, eschewing superfluous description, thus reducing cognitive load of learners of anatomy looking up terms. AnatomicalTerms.info is a readily accessible online source for both the authoritative and alternatively used terms that can accurately cross-reference and/or disambiguate anatomical structures across disciplinary and cultural divides. As such, it can serve as a useful educational and clinical resource that is also flexibly open to additions and expansion as anatomical and clinical needs dictate.
RESUMO
The many synonyms for anatomical structures confuse medical students and complicate medical communication. Easily accessible translations would alleviate this problem. None of the presently available resources-Terminologia Anatomica (TA), digital terminologies such as the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA), and websites-are fully satisfactory to this aim. Internet technologies offer new possibilities to solve the problem. Several authors have called for an online TA. An online translation resource should be easily accessible, user-friendly, comprehensive, expandable, and its quality determinable. As first step towards this goal, we built a translation website that we named www.AnatomicalTerms.info, based on the database of the FMA. It translates between English, Latin, eponyms, and to a lesser extent other languages, and presently contains over 31,000 terms for 7,250 structures, covering 95% of TA. In addition, it automatically presents searches for images, documents and anatomical variations regarding the sought structure. Several terminological and conceptual issues were encountered in transferring data from TA and FMA into AnatomicalTerms.info, resultant from these resources' different set-ups (paper versus digital) and targets (machine versus human-user). To the best of our knowledge, AnatomicalTerms.info is unique in its combination of user-friendliness and comprehensiveness. As next step, wiki-like expandability will be added to enable open contribution of clinical synonyms and terms in different languages. Specific quality measures will be taken to strike a balance between open contribution and quality assurance. AnatomicalTerms.info's mechanism that "translates" terms to structures furthermore may enhance targeted searching by linking images, descriptions, and other anatomical resources to the structures.
