Considered by leaders in health care technology to be a necessary step towards the enhancement of patient care, a 5-year, nationwide license for SNOMED Clinical Terms® (SNOMED CT®) was purchased by agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services for perpetual use by any governmental or eligible public, forprofit and non-profit organization located, incorporated and operating in the U.S....

Ontology search interfaces can benefit from the latest information retrieval advances. This paper introduces a Conjunctive Ontology Browser and Explorer (COBE) for searching and exploring SNOMED CT concepts and visualizing SNOMED CT fragments. COBE combines navigational exploration (NE) with direct lookup (DL) as two complementary modes for finding specific SNOMED CT concepts. The NE mode allow...

The parallel use of different versions of classifications and terminologies complicates the comparability of coded patient data. Annual adaptations of classifications like ICD-10 can be dealt with by using simple conversion tables. Terminologies like SNOMED CT have a much more complicate structure and biannual versions in different languages are offered in at least four representation formats. ...

Adoption of SNOMED CT has not been as quick and easy as many people had hoped or expected. One reason is lack of education and hence understanding of what SNOMED CT does and how it works. We set out to answer the question "who needs to know what?" about SNOMED CT to help establish priorities for UK higher education. We devised an online questionnaire and obtained 177 responses, 51% health IT pr...

The aim of this paper is to apply and develop methods based on Natural Language Processing for automatically testing the validity, reliability and coverage of various Swedish SNOMED-CT subsets, the Systematized NOmenclature of MEDicine Clinical Terms a multiaxial, hierarchical classification system which is currently being translated from English to Swedish. Our work has been developed across t...

OBJECTIVE We introduce a structural-lexical approach for auditing SNOMED CT using a combination of non-lattice subgraphs of the underlying hierarchical relations and enriched lexical attributes of fully specified concept names. Our goal is to develop a scalable and effective approach that automatically identifies missing hierarchical IS-A relations. METHODS Our approach involves 3 stages. In ...

In 2015 ICD-10-PCS replaced ICD-9-CM for coding medical procedures in the U.S. We explored two methods to automatically map SNOMED CT surgical procedures to ICD-10-PCS. First, we used MetaMap to lexically map ICD-10-PCS index terms to SNOMED CT. Second, we made use of the axial structure of ICD-10-PCS and aligned them to defining attributes in SNOMED CT. Lexical mapping produced 45% of correct ...

Two mapping projects are currently underway, creating maps from SNOMED CT to ICD-10 and ICD-10-CM respectively. Even though the two projects belong to different organizations, there has been a lot of synergism between them. The ICD-10-CM map project heavily re-used the mapping methodology, tools and map data developed in the ICD-10 map project. An algorithm was derived to generate candidate ICD...

One criterion for the well-formedness of ontologies is that their hierarchical structure forms a lattice. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) has been used as a technique for assessing the quality of ontologies, but is not scalable to large ontologies such as SNOMED CT (> 300k concepts). We developed a methodology called Lattice-based Structural Auditing (LaSA), for auditing biomedical ontologies, im...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the coverage provided by SNOMED CT for clinical research concepts represented by the items on case report forms (CRFs), as well as the semantic nature of those concepts relevant to post-coordination methods. DESIGN Convenience samples from CRFs developed by rheumatologists conducting several longitudinal, observational studies of vasculitis were selected. A total of 17 C...