DeCS - Health Sciences Descriptors is a structured and trilingual vocabulary created by BIREME - Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information - in 1987 for indexing scientific journal articles, books, proceedings of congresses, technical reports and other types of materials, as well as for searching and recovering scientific information in LILACS, MEDLINE and other databases. In the VHL, Virtual Health Library, DeCS is the tool that permits the navigation between records and sources of information through controlled concepts and organized in Portuguese, Spanish and English.