Construction of Local Data Dictionary in the Field of Nuclear Medicine

A controlled medical vocabulary is a vital component of medical information management because it enables computers to use information meaningfully and different institutions to share the medical data. There are currently many standard medical vocabularies - SNOMED-CT, ICD-10, UMLS, GALEN, MED, etc, but none is universally accepted as an optimal controlled medical vocabulary for application to medical information system. Moreover, it is difficult to settle the well-designed local data dictionary consisting of controlled medical vocabularies for the individual hospital information system (HIS). One of the major reasons is the local terminology with poor contents have been used in the hospital. Thus, as a trial, the local controlled vocabulary referencing system has being constructed in a limited medical field - nuclear medicine. We selected practical nuclear medicine terms from interpretation reports and electronic medical records, and removed ambiguity and redundancy, mapping the selected terms to standard medical vocabularies. Relationship and hierarchy structure between terms have being made, referring to standard medical vocabularies. Further studies may be warranted.