Automated Mapping of Observation Archetypes to SNOMED CT Concepts - Foundations on Natural and Artificial Computation - page 550

However, the lack of automated methods simplifying the mapping process
hampers interoperability. There is, among others, one problem making inter-
operability dicult: the excessive time required in manual processes, entailing
exceptional and unfinished mappings. Therefore, automated methods to over-
come this inconvenience are needed. There are some attempts in the literature,
such as the MoST system [5], but more research is needed to provide useful tools.
In this paper, we propose an automated mapping method between an archety-
pe content items and SNOMED CT concepts in order to offer an important aid
to archetype construction support.
2 Materials
2.1 Archetypes
Archetypes provide clinicians with high-quality, re-usable clinical models of con-
tents and processes together with formal interfaces to terminology. There are
four types of archetypes to reflect common medical tasks for the clinicians in-
terpretation: observations, evaluations, instructions and actions. Archetype are
built using the Archetype Definition Language (ADL), which has been admitted
as ISO draft, following the specifications of OpenEHR for an Electronic Health
Record (EHR). An ADL file is comprised of several sections; the most important
for this work are the showed in Fig. 1:
- Definition section containing the description of the archetype using cons-
traints on instances of the types: HISTORY, EVENT, ITEM LIST, ELE-
MENT, QUANTITY and CODED TEXT.
- Ontology section: In this section, term codes are associated with text,
description and bindings to other terminologies.
We work with the openEHR information model, and no others like CEN[6],
HL7[7] or OMG HDTF[8], due to several reasons:
1. The openEHR Foundation is making an effort to integrate openEHR and
SNOMED CT.
2. It is influenced by the other information models.
3. It fulfills the ISO, CEN and HL7 standards.
2.2 SNOMED CT
SNOMED CT consists of a set of concepts defined by descriptions and relation-
ships with other concepts, such as:
- The hierarchical relationship IS A : All SNOMED CT concepts are
descendants of a set of top level hierarchies.
- Attribute relationships between two concepts. There are different types
of these relationships such as, the relationship has interpretation (grouped
with the attribute interprets ) which designates the judgement aspect being
evaluatedointerpretedforaconcept(e.g.presence,absence,degree,...)An
example of this type of relationship is shown in Table 1.