In this paper we investigate representation of the part-whole relationship in SNOMED CT. We discuss the current approach, based on “SEP” triples, and several translations of it, which involve DLs at different levels of expressivity. We intend that our analysis will concretely inform the SNOMED community about the important tradeoffs of expressivity for their ontology, and help with future decis...

SNOMED CT is a large and complex medical terminology. Thousands of editing operations are applied to its content for each new release. Understanding what changed in a release is important for the end user and SNOMED CT editors. Each SNOMED CT release comes with release notes that provide a brief description of the changes that occurred and a set of “delta” files that identify individual changes...

This paper describes the findings of an exploratory study on reverse mapping of ICD-10-CA, the Canadian Adaptation, to SNOMED CT. For this study a set of 5,000 most frequent ICD-10-CA codes from the health ministry of a Canadian province was used. The methods included applying six mapping algorithms to each ICD-10-CA description to find the matching SNOMED CT concepts, and comparing the output ...

This paper describes the system created by the University of Texas at Dallas for contentbased medical record retrieval submitted to the TREC 2011 Medical Records Track. Our system builds a query by extracting keywords from a given topic using a Wikipedia-based approach we use regular expressions to extract age, gender, and negation requirements. Each query is then expanded by relying on UMLS, S...

INTRODUCTION This article is part of the Focus Theme of METHODS of Information in Medicine on "Managing Interoperability and Complexity in Health Systems". OBJECTIVES In previous work, we have defined methods for the extraction of lexical patterns from labels as an initial step towards semi-automatic ontology enrichment methods. Our previous findings revealed that many biomedical ontologies c...

There has been major progress both in description logics and ontology design since SNOMED was originally developed. The emergence of the standard Web Ontology language in its latest revision, OWL 1.1 is leading to a rapid proliferation of tools. Combined with the increase in computing power in the past two decades, these developments mean that many of the restrictions that limited SNOMED's orig...

BACKGROUND Patient-based similarity metrics are important case-based reasoning tools which may assist with research and patient care applications. Ontology and information content principles may be potentially helpful tools for similarity metric development. METHODS Patient cases from 1989 through 2003 from the Columbia University Medical Center data repository were converted to SNOMED CT con...

The emphasis on evidence based medicine (EBM) has placed increased focus on finding timely answers to clinical questions in presence of patients. Using a combination of natural language processing for the generation of clinical excerpts and information theoretic distance based clustering, we evaluated multiple approaches for the efficient presentation of context-sensitive EBM excerpts.

SNOMED CT is a complex ontology; sophisticated browsers are required to make it understandable and useful. We identified 23 SNOMED CT browsers that have been developed, and inspected 17. We enumerate and provide test criteria for a ‘master list’ of 143 browsing features supported by at least one inspected browser; future work will determine which of these features are implemented by individual ...