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Showing posts from March, 2016

Finally, a medical terminology that patients, doctors, and machines can all understand.

By Nicole Vasilevsky, Mark Engelstad, Erin Foster, Julie McMurry, Chris Mungall, Peter Robinson, Sebastian Köhler, Melissa Haendel For many patients with rare and undiagnosed diseases, getting an accurate diagnosis, or even finding the appropriate experts is a long and winding road. To accelerate and facilitate this process, we developed a medical vocabulary (“HPO”) which is comprised of 12,000 terms that doctors can use to codify the precise and distinct observations about patients and their conditions. The HPO is structured in a way that enables machines to intelligently compare a patient’s profile with what scientists worldwide have already uncovered about diseases and their genetic causes. Until now, most of the HPO labels and synonyms were composed of clinical terms unfamiliar to patients. For example, a patient may know they are ‘color-blind’, but may not be familiar with the clinical term ‘Dyschromatopsia’. This is why we developed a layer of 5,000 corresponding terms tha