Exploiting the UMLS Metathesaurus for extracting and categorizing concepts representing signs and symptoms to anatomically related organ systems

•Challenge: classify patient reported symptoms to organ systems for population health and epidemiological analyses.•Concepts representing physical and mental signs and symptoms are not easily identified from the UMLS.•Presenting a method for extracting concepts representing physical and mental signs and symptoms from the UMLS.•The presented method also maps the extracted concepts to the anatomically related organ systems.•Result: Nearly 91,000 concepts (approximately 300,000 descriptions) were extracted and mapped.