Metonymies are language phenomena, in which one expression is used to refer to a related one. Whereas there are many examples in medical discourse, it has been controversially discussed to what extent metonymic phenomena also matter in medical terminologies like SNOMED CT, where they could hamper their proper use. We investigated this by analyzing all SNOMED CT single word fully specified names...

The purpose of this study was to map the North American Nursing Diagnosis Association (NANDA) nursing diagnoses to the International Classification for Nursing Practice Version 1.0 (ICNP) and to compare the resulting representations and relationships to those within SNOMED Clinical Terms (CT). Independent reviewers reached agreement on 25 (i.e. 64%) of the 39 parent-child relationships identifi...

OBJECTIVE Little information exists concerning SNOMED CT (systematized nomenclature of medicine-clinical terms) users. This report describes current impressions and preferences of direct SNOMED CT users regarding coverage, quality, and concept details, and the change request mechanism. DESIGN A 43-question anonymous survey distributed electronically to relevant online communities. MEASUREME...

VCM (Visualization of Concept in Medicine) is an iconic language for representing key medical concepts by icons. However, the use of this language with reference terminologies, such as SNOMED CT, will require the mapping of its icons to the terms of these terminologies. Here, we present and evaluate a semi-automatic semantic method for the mapping of SNOMED CT concepts to VCM icons. Both SNOMED...

Medical science and health care both possess a strong tradition of structuring their terminological knowledge through controlled vocabularies, such as nomenclatures, thesauri, or classification systems [1-6]. The availability of such resources mirrors the need for sharing a common understanding of the employed terms and the semantic relations holding between them. Community-wide efforts such as...

OBJECTIVE The integration of SNOMED CT into the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) involved the alignment of two views of synonymy that were different because the two vocabulary systems have different intended purposes and editing principles. The UMLS is organized according to one view of synonymy, but its structure also represents all the individual views of synonymy present in its source ...

Semantic interoperability in healthcare can be achieved by a tighter coupling of terminology and HL7 message models. In this paper, we highlight the difficulty of achieving this goal, but show how it can become attainable by basing HL7 message models on SNOMED CT concepts and relationships. We then demonstrate how this methodology has been applied to a set of clinical observations for use in th...

Interoperability among medication classification systems is known to be limited. We investigated the mapping of the Established Pharmacologic Classes (EPCs) to SNOMED CT. We compared lexical and instance-based methods to an expert-reviewed reference standard to evaluate contributions of these methods. Of the 543 EPCs, 284 had an equivalent SNOMED CT class, 205 were more specific, and 54 could n...

OBJECTIVES Medical terminologies vary in the amount of concept information (the "density") represented, even in the same sub-domains. This causes problems in terminology mapping, semantic harmonization and terminology integration. Moreover, complex clinical scenarios need to be encoded by a medical terminology with comprehensive content. SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT), a leading clinical ter...

Objectives: To assess the need for a standard terminology for Fetal Medicine. Methods: We start by establishing a corpus of fetal medicine articles, in order to support term extraction. We evaluate the coverage of the extracted terms in standard terminologies and assess the quality of these terms by manual review and natural language processing tools. Results: Our corpus includes 2,437 articles...