Exploring the ontology of surgical procedures in the Read Thesaurus.
The Read Thesaurus is a comprehensive user-led clinical vocabulary developed from earlier, and structurally simpler, versions of the Read Codes, with substantial input from United Kingdom health care professionals. A constituent template table underpins a range of functions, including semantic definition of concepts using object-attribute-value triples. Concept representation for surgical procedures has been investigated by a number of groups and a standard European structure has been proposed. Over 50% of the surgical procedures in the Read Thesaurus have been fully characterised using a number of attributes each with a defined concept field. We report progress to date and, based on our large-scale experience, examine the applicability of the European model to a user-defined terminology.
Price
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C
NHS Centre for Coding and Classification, Loughborough, United Kingdom. cprice@l-boro.demon.co.uk
O'Neil
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M
Bentley
T E
TE
Brown
P J
PJ
D005060:Europe; D006801:Humans; D008491:Medical Informatics Applications; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D009870:Operating Room Information Systems; D012984:Software; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D006113:United Kingdom; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled