SNOMED CT is the most sophisticated reference terminology currently available for the representation of healthcare. An unforeseen consequence of the opportunistic evolutionary process for SNOMED CT may be that some terms for disorders of specialised clinical domains are not represented within the terminology. The SNOMED CT July 2006 release was systematically examined using the CliniClue termin...

Objective: To investigate the lexico-syntactic properties of clinical phenotype terms in order to identify partial lexical mappings between HPO and SNOMED CT. Methods: We identify modifiers HPO terms and attempt to map demodified terms to SNOMED CT through UMLS. Results: We identified partial mappings to SNOMED CT for 20% of HPO concepts with no complete mapping to SNOMED CT. Conclusions: Throu...

needs of practical applications with the importance of the purity and accuracy of the terminology is a very difficult task..’ We would actually state that it is impossible. We would assert that hierarchies are created for a purpose. The purpose could be to support automated maintenance of the terminology, to create definitional relationships, or to allow appropriate inferences. If the different...

Relation reversals in ontological systems refer to such patterns as a path from concept A to concept B in one version becoming a path with the position of A and B switched in another version. We present a scalable approach, using cloud computing, to systematically extract all hierarchical relation reversals among 8 SNOMED CT versions from 2009 to 2014. Taking advantage of our MapReduce algorith...

Topic: A preliminary study on the reproducibility of results when mapping terms from an existing terminology to SNOMED CT post-coordinated expressions is described. Background: Implementing SNOMED CT requires a strategy for migrating existing systems and data that currently use other terminologies as well as ensuring that SNOMED CT contains suitable content that covers the domain. Mapping terms...

After a critical review of the present architecture of SNOMED CT, addressing both logical and ontological issues, we present a roadmap towards an overall improvement of this terminology. In particular, we recommend the following actions: Upper level categories should be rearranged according to a standard upper level ontology. Meta-class like concepts should be identified and removed from the ta...

Multiword terms (MWTs) are relevant strings of words in text collections. Once they are automatically extracted, they may be used by an Information Retrieval system, suggesting its users possible conceptual interesting refinements of their information needs. As a matter of fact, these multiword terms point to relevant information, often corresponding to topics and subtopics in the text collecti...

Clinical documentation needs to be fine-grained to truthfully represent the history, development, and treatment of a patient. But natural language, as the main information carrier, is characterized by many issues, like idiosyncratic terminology, spelling and grammar errors, and a lack of grammatical structure. Therefore coding systems, like ICD-10, have been introduced, but their use varies hig...

There is a plethora of disease ontologies available, all potentially useful for the annotation of biological datasets. We define seven desirable features for such ontologies and examine whether or not these features are supported by eleven disease ontologies. The four ontologies most closely aligned with our desiderata are Disease Ontology, SNOMED CT, NCI thesaurus and UMLS.

BACKGROUND Although efforts to improve the classification of hypersensitivity/allergic diseases have been made, they have not been considered a top-level category in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-10 and still are not in the ICD-11 beta phase linearization. ICD-10 is the most used classification system by the allergy community worldwide but it is not considered as appropriat...