A crossmap between successive versions of classification systems is necessary to maintain the continuity of health care documentation. A reference terminology can serve as an intermediary to support this task. Within this study we evaluated the use of SNOMED CT to create a crossmap between two versions of an intensive care classification system. Firstly, the SNOMED CT crossmap was compared with...

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 Standards terminologies may be large and complex, making their quality assurance challenging. Some terminology quality assurance (TQA) methodologies are based on abstraction networks (AbNs), compact terminology summaries. We have tested AbNs and the performance of related TQA methodologies on small terminology hierarchies. However, some standards terminologies, for example, SNOMED, ar...

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...

Medical narratives written by clinicians constitute critical information in healthcare domain and are required to be correct with respect to contextual meaning. SNOMED CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine -Clinical Terms) is a standardized reference terminology that consists of 390023 SNOMED CT concepts with SNOMED CT codes. This paper describes the extraction of SNOMED CT concepts from fr...

Complete patient health information that is available where and when it is needed is essential to providers and patients and improves healthcare quality and patient safety. VA and DoD have built on their previous experience in patient data exchange to establish data standards and terminology services to enable real-time bi-directional computable (i.e., encoded) data exchange and achieve semanti...

We describe the framework for SNOMED RT (Reference Terminology), designed to complement the broad coverage of medical concepts in SNOMED with a set of enhanced features that significantly increases its value as a reference terminology for representing clinical data. We describe what is meant by a reference terminology, and differentiate SNOMED RT from specialized terminologies that enable user ...

Quality assurance and audit issues play a major role in maintening large biomedical terminology, such as SNOMED CT. Several automatized techniques have been proposed to facilitate the identification of weak spots and suggest adequate improvements.In this study, we address a well-known issue within SNOMED CT: Albeit the wording of many free-text concept descriptions suggests a connection to othe...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the usability of a large compositional interface terminology based on SNOMED CT and the terminology application for registration of the reasons for intensive care admission in a Patient Data Management System. DESIGN Observational study with user-based usability evaluations before and 3 months after the system was implemented and routinely used. MEASUREMENTS Usability ...

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...