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. 2017 Feb 10:2016:974-983.
eCollection 2016.

Tracking the Remodeling of SNOMED CT's Bacterial Infectious Diseases

Christopher Ochs  1 , James T Case  2 , Yehoshua Perl  1
Affiliations

Tracking the Remodeling of SNOMED CT's Bacterial Infectious Diseases

Christopher Ochs et al. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. .

Abstract

SNOMED CT's content undergoes many changes from one release to the next. Over the last year SNOMED CT's Bacterial infectious disease subhierarchy has undergone significant editing to bring consistent modeling to its concepts. In this paper we analyze the stated and inferred structural modifications that affected the Bacterial infectious disease subhierarchy between the Jan 2015 and Jan 2016 SNOMED CT releases using a two-phased approach. First, we introduce a methodology for creating a human readable list of changes. Next, we utilize partial-area taxonomies, which are compact summaries of SNOMED CT's content and structure, to identify the "big picture" changes that occurred in the subhierarchy. We illustrate how partial-area taxonomies can be used to help identify groups of concepts that were affected by these editing operations and the nature of these changes. Modeling issues identified using our two-phase methodology are discussed.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
(a) An excerpt of 19 concepts from the Bacterial infectious disease subhierarchy. Concepts are shown as white boxes. Arrows represent IS-A relationships. Colored, dashed bubbles indicated a set of concepts have the same types of attribute relationships. (b) The area taxonomy for the concepts in (a). Areas are shown as colored boxes and labeled with their set of attribute relationships and number of concepts. Upward arrows represent hierarchical child-of links between areas. (c) The subject subtaxonomy for the concepts in (a). Partial-areas are shown as white boxes in their areas and are labeled with the name of their root and their number of concepts. Upward direct arrows indicate child-of links between partial-areas.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
An example of how the changes to the concepts in the Bacterial infection by site (372) partial-area are captured in subject subtaxonomies derived for three SNOMED CT versions. (a) The Jan 2015 {Causative agent, Finding site, Pathological process} area with its single partial-area. (b) The July 2015 version of the area from (a). The partial-area Bacterial infection by site lost 196 concepts and a total of 110 new partial-areas (19 shown) appeared due to changes in the underlying concept hierarchy (c) Jan 2016 version of the area from (a). The blue partial-areas in (b) were merged back into the Bacterial infection by site partial-area. New partial-areas (e.g., Tetanus (9)) also appeared, indicating a change in their concept’s semantics. Several partial-areas (e.g., Lepromatous leprosy (2)) still exist in the area. Other partial-areas moved to areas with more relationships (e.g., Tuberculosis of genitourinary system (6) moved to the area {Associated morphology, Causative agent, Finding site, Pathological process} and grew to 19 concepts). The concepts in Tuberculosis of urinary organs (4) moved to this partial-area.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Examples of stated modeling for concepts remodeled between Jan 2015 and Jan 2016. (a-d) Show the modeling of Boil of lower limb and (e-h) show the modeling of Staphylococcal infection of skin. (a) Stated, Jan 2015. (b) Stated, Jan 2016. (c) Inferred, Jan 2015. (d) Inferred, Jan 2016. (e) Stated, Jan 2015. (f) Stated, Jan 2016. (g) Inferred, Jan 2015. (h) Inferred, Jan 2016.
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References

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