RE: SenseLab note: some updates

>There is an interesting trade-off between post-coordinated and pre-
>coordinated
>vocabularies in the clinical context.
>
>For instance if you have the following concept fracture (site =
femur,
>laterality = left) this can be used in two contexts:
>- In a search and exploration context, where post-coordination makes
>sense,
>e.g., get me all diseases with site = X and laterality = Y
>- In a patient encounter context, however, it would be too much to
>expect a
>physician to document each of these (disease, site, laterality)
>separately in
>the patient record --- requires too many clicks. A physician is
>perfectly happy
>to click once and document "left femur fracture" ... Saves him time
and
>aggravation.

Why can't we let the doctor just type "left femur fracture" and
decompose this into fracture (site = femur, laterality = left). There
is a lot of debate on pre vs post co-ordination but very little work
to actually bridge the two paradigms... either at acquisition time or
post-hoc (such as that for mouse phenotypes).

-Nigam.

Received on Wednesday, 28 May 2008 21:09:07 UTC