title: Exploring the ontology of surgical procedures in the Read Thesaurus.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: NHS Centre for Coding and Classification, Loughborough, United Kingdom. cprice@l-boro.demon.co.uk
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Price
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: O'Neil
authors.forename: T E
authors.initials: TE
authors.lastname: Bentley
authors.forename: P J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Brown
mesh_terms: 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