Using concept markers to find genetics content in a medical school curriculum

In order to determine where genetics is taught in our medical school curriculum, we used the KnowledgeMap(KM) concept indexer to index twenty lecture document by UMLS concepts. Half of these lectures had been pre-categorized as having "high genetics" and half as "low genetics" content. UMLS concepts from two genetics term sources: NIH genetics glossary and MeSH "genetics tree" terms served as the sources of "genetics" markers. Percentage of concept matches from "NIH" markers was 14% in "high genetics" 2.7% in "low genetics" content lectures. For MeSH markers, there was a 6% concept match rate in "high" and 0.4% in "low genetics" lectures. Thus, these two sources, combined with the KM program, proved useful for identifying genetics content.