# Why use medcat over ctakes?

**URL:** <https://discourse.cogstack.org/t/why-use-medcat-over-ctakes/118>\
**Category:** MedCAT\
**Created:** [December 19, 2022, 10:37pm UTC](https://discourse.cogstack.org/t/why-use-medcat-over-ctakes/118 "2022-12-19T22:37:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![bkakke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bcef8e/32.png) [@bkakke](https://discourse.cogstack.org/u/bkakke)\
**Post date:** [December 19, 2022, 10:37pm UTC](https://discourse.cogstack.org/t/why-use-medcat-over-ctakes/118/1 "2022-12-19T22:37:51Z")

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I have looked into the medcat paper and I would still like to ask, apart from reported better F-score, what makes medcat a better solution than ctakes?

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**Author:** ![tomolopolis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/6de8d8/32.png) [@tomolopolis](https://discourse.cogstack.org/u/tomolopolis)\
**Post date:** [December 20, 2022, 3:37pm UTC](https://discourse.cogstack.org/t/why-use-medcat-over-ctakes/118/2 "2022-12-20T15:37:54Z")

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hi @bkakke - we’re obviously a bit biased here - but MedCAT is superior not only in terms of F-Score also:

- MedCAT is terminology flexible. UMLS, SNOMED CT, ICD, OPCS, RadLex, HPO and so on. cTakes only supports UMLS.
- You can build your own custom ontology with MedCAT - you can build from scratch, or you can extend an existing ontology via the MedCATtrainer interface.
- MedCAT is language agnostic - if you can represent it in unicode - great MedCAT can annotate it. We’ve had users annotate Dutch, french, spanish, korean and chinese, alongside english. This is because MedCAT doesn’t rely on UMLS and american focused ontology.
- MedCAT is easily installable and integrated into a clinical NLP pipeline via MedCATService, and small lightweight library.
- self-supervised and supervised training for model fine-tuning. Annotation collection and viewing is possible via the [Trainer interface](https://github.com/CogStack/MedCATtrainer/)
- model pipelines are transferable via a couple lines of code and completely self-contained .zip file.
- configurable meta-annotations (cTakes nomenclature - property)) - its possible to define meta-annotations in the Trainer and collect any annotations for any definable task.
- its an actively used and maintained project - we have a growing team of developers and users improving the tools on a daily / weekly basis.