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Hello! This is Sonja from B2i Healthcare.
Today I would like to show you how to use Snow Owl to search for terms within
the UK Edition of the SNOMED CT terminology.
As we go through the examples, I will also provide a bit of background information
on the content of SNOMED CT.
When you open Snow Owl you will see a screen similar to this one.
This is the text field
where you can enter a search term.
Let's look for Myocardial infarction.
I type in MYO and hit TAB to auto complete
and the matching term is already displayed in the list. So all I have to do is
click it
and this will open up the concept editor where we can find detailed
information about this concept.
The concept editor consists of
three different sections which can be opened and closed using
the triangles.
Let's look at the first one.
Descriptions are
terms
or clinical phrases that describe a concept.
Each concept has
a fully specified name, this is this one here
which is the name that is unique for this concept.
A fully specified name also has a term in parentheses which is called the semantic
tag.
The semantic tag
refers to
the top-level hierarchy the concept belongs to.
In this hierarchical view we can see the SNOMED CT hierarchy was
the root concept on the top and the nineteen top-level concepts
are, each of them representing a different hierarchy.
So
Myocardial infarction would belong to this order, would be a subcategory of
clinical
finding.
There are also several synonyms which are
names or terms
with the same or similar meaning
such as Cardiac infarction, Heart attack or
MI for Myocardial infraction.
One term is marked with a rosette icon. This is this one here
Myocardial infarction.
This indicates the preferred term.
The preferred term is a description that this most commonly used by clinicians and
this can vary from country to country. Since we're looking at the UK Edition
this is the preferred term for the UK.
Another country might have a different preferred term.
The preferred term is also what shows up in the search list
up here
because it's the term that is most likely searched for and known.
By the way
the way the terms are sorted here is based on their
global usage frequency so terms that are used more often in practice
will have a higher ranking and show up
higher
on the list.
Let's look at the next section,
the Properties.
It displays the concepts relationships which give you information on how the
concept is connected to other concepts.
There is always at least one
IS A relationship
which indicate the parent concept, or in this case we have three
parent concepts
which are concepts that are one level higher up in the hierarchy. Let me show
you what this looks like. I'm just going to connect the editor with the
hierarchical view
and now we can see where Myocardial infarction
is located within the SNOMED CT hierarchy
and if we go one level higher up, we can see Myocardial
disease
which is one of the parent concepts
this one here. If you want to see the other one, I can just simply look at the parents
view with the Myocardial infarction on top
and the parents on the bottom so it's exactly the other way around.
So parent concepts are more general terms like there are a lot of myocardial diseases
and Myocardial infarction is one of them.
However they are different
types of heart attack which are the children
actually, this one has sixty two children. If you hover over a concept you
can see the children displayed.
So
children are more specific terms
such as Acute myocardial infarction or Postoperative myocardial infarction,
and if I open this one and browse even further down in the hierarchy,
I can see
different subtypes of Postoperative
myocardial
infraction.
Myocardial infarction has also some other relationships which are down here.
One is the Finding site, this tells us
where the disease occurs which is in the heart muscle so in the Myocardium
structure.
We can also learn something about the associated morphology so about the
form in the structure of the disease
which is an infarct, so this refers to tissue death.
Let's take a look at the last section, the SNOMED CT Properties. Here we
can find metadata about the concept, for example,
the concept ID
which is a unique identifier, a numerical identifier of the concept. We can
see
when the concept was published, this is the effective time
and which module it belongs to, so this one here
is the SNOMED CT core mark.
If it was a concept that was created for a particular country or region, for
example, the UK
you could see
this here.
Let me show an example for a concept that is specific for the UK,
the Pain self-efficacy questionnaire.
I don't have to type in the entire term
I can just
type in
the acronym
and here's already the concept I was looking for
and here you can see that this is the
United Kingdom clinical extension
module and if we look
at the hierarchical view you can see
that the icon has a little
flag of the United Kingdom
and so we can very easily distinguish
which are specific
for the UK Edition of SNOMED CT so these concepts that have
a little flag.
OK, let's close the hierarchy
and just look at the top-level concepts.
As I said the fully-specified name is unique so two concepts cannot
have the same fully-specified name
however, the same preferred term
can have different meanings.
Let me give you an example. If I type in the term
dressing,
it shows up three times in my list: dressing, dressing, dressing so I don't
know
which is the dressing I'm looking for.
So these icons actually help you to identify
what kind of concept you are
seeing here
so this one, the magnifying class refers to the top level category of observable
entity.
So this would be
dressing
as a personal care activity so getting dressed.
This one is a qualifier value so that refers to a unit of drug
administration.
And this one is the physical object you might have thought of,
this is the dressing that is applied
on a wound and this has the little
icon, the icon for the glasses.
So the icons help you to instantly pick the concept that you're looking for,
it's not necessary
to open each of them up
to find out
which
one you wanted to find.
It's also possible to restrict a search,
for example, if you were looking
for all the procedures associated with dtressing, you could use
this button that opens up a search dialogue
and you can enter a search term here dressing
and then you can restrict it to a certain
top-level
concept. Of course there are a lot of other possibilities but I just wanted to
show you this one.
Click search,
and then the search results are displayed in this window here.
It can be maximized and there you have
ninety-three results and if you want to take a closer look, you just double click it
and this opens up
the concept editor
about
the procedure application of
dressing.
Even within the same category you can have synonymous terms.
A good example for this case is
fundus which refers
to the bottom section
of an organ and dependent on what specialist you are talking to
the term might refer to different organs.
But since the preferred term is displayed here in the list and
not the synonym you can actually instantly see
what kind of fundus
is this concept is about so, for example,
fundus of eye, fundus of gallbladder,
and it's also possible
to create a customized search profile so that your concepts are sorted based on your
specialties so
if you are an eye doctor,
you might modify your search results of that this fundus
would show up higher in the list or
you could exclude
certain terms, for instance the non-
human terms, the nonhuman reference set then this fundus this would not be
displayed at all because it's a veterinary term.
Finally, I would like to show you that you cannot only do searches for
concepts but also for a reference set.
There's one called
occupational
therapy
assessment scales.
Here are again SNOMED CT concepts I just typed in the term
occupational, so this everything with occupational
and then in this category you can see this is our reference set,
these are actually results from ICD-10 so you can
search other terminologies as well
but let's
look at the reference set.
I can maximize it
this reference set here has a hundred and seventeen
members and now you can do a special kind of search which is called filter
search
that only
searches within
this reference set.
So let's look for the Allen
Cognitive level screening tool, that's already here
and if you click it,
then you can see detailed information
displayed about this concept again.
If I did the same kind of search
up here, in the quick search, it would search the entire
ontology and let's see
what happens.
So here are
also the two results that I had in the reference set but I also have some
results in grey
and the grey indicates that these are not exact
matches but approximate matches and so I have an observable entity,
the score
or I have procedure, the assessment procedure
of actually administering this Allen cognitive level
screening test.
OK,
so that's all I wanted to show you.
It was just a short introduction. If you want more detailed
information, please go to our website.
There are lots of videos there and documentation about different kinds of
searches you can do with Snow Owl and about the other features of Snow Owl
and I hope
you found it useful and interesting and thank you very much for
your attention.