Abstract
While SNOMED International has been generally accepted by the international community of pathologists, its use for primary and secondary care remains limited. This can probably be attributed to the coding complexity of clinical concepts into this multiaxial postcoordinated nomenclature. The SNOMED editors propose the use of multiple codes (aggregates) for any nuanced clinical concept, thus allowing alternative rigorous representations of the concept with SNOMED codes. Some classification critics argue whether such redundant coding precludes precise retrieval of data. This research was initiated to compare the retrieval accuracies of a relational database using a simplified model of SNOMED against a classification-based model. SNOMED-based queries showed improvement over ICPC-based queries, regardless of the use of SNOMED cross-references. The addition of the latter significantly improved the queries sensitivity and false negative rate. In conclusion, the authors recommend using aggregates of SNOMED codes in relational database designs over classification-based designs in order to improve retrieval accuracy.
Full text
PDF
Selected References
These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.
- Brigl B., Mieth M., Haux R., Glück E. The LBI-method for automated indexing of diagnoses by using SNOMED. Part 2. Evaluation. Int J Biomed Comput. 1995 Feb;38(2):101–108. doi: 10.1016/0020-7101(94)01062-6. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Campbell K. E., Das A. K., Musen M. A. A logical foundation for representation of clinical data. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 1994 May-Jun;1(3):218–232. doi: 10.1136/jamia.1994.95236154. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Do Amaral Marcio B., Satomura Y. Associating semantic grammars with the SNOMED: processing medical language and representing clinical facts into a language-independent frame. Medinfo. 1995;8(Pt 1):18–22. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Evans D. A., Cimino J. J., Hersh W. R., Huff S. M., Bell D. S. Toward a medical-concept representation language. The Canon Group. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 1994 May-Jun;1(3):207–217. doi: 10.1136/jamia.1994.95236153. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Pole P. M., Rector A. L. Mapping the GALEN CORE model to SNOMED-III: initial experiments. Proc AMIA Annu Fall Symp. 1996:100–104. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Wingert F. An indexing system for SNOMED. Methods Inf Med. 1986 Jan;25(1):22–30. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]