[ExI] good bexarotene article

[BillK]

On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 4:12 AM, spike wrote:
> There may be a way to reduce diseases to a number or series of numbers.
> This will be needed for sorting purposes.  For instance, all cancer could be
> 4.  Then perhaps colon could be 12, and hyposquamal scatorsic cell could be
> 16 with frumbic
> slambonian harcomipsis syndrome is 5, so a patient with that type of disease
> would be 4.12.16.5.3 once they hit stage 3.
>
> The medications would also be numbered in some systematic fashion.  We would
> encode somehow the age of the patient, their race, their bad habits, their
> good habits, whatever we can put in a matrix.  Then we can apply our
> mathematical tools that we know so very well, sparse matrix techniques used
> in satellite control systems for instance.  It wouldn't even hurt much if
> the patients lie: statistical methods can deal with that.
>
> Now we would need a central website I suppose and some means of getting
> people to drop data into it.  We could set it up in some sort of spreadsheet
> perhaps, and let our volunteer background process team grind away, looking
> for correlations or signals in the pile of data.
>
> Have we any medics among us who can suggest a data structure?  Or point to
> one that already exists?
>
>


Quick to write down, but you are talking about a huge project. Once
you get into it, it is ferociously complicated.

The medical profession have been trying to develop a disease coding
system for over 40 years, with some success.

SNOWMED CT seems to be the latest system
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOMED_CT>

It covers areas such as diseases, symptoms, operations, treatments,
devices and drugs. Its purpose is to consistently index, store,
retrieve, and aggregate clinical data across specialties and sites of
care. It helps organizing the content of electronic health records
systems, reducing the variability in the way data is captured, encoded
and used for clinical care of patients and research.
-----------------------
Over four decades, SNOMED has developed from a pathology-specific
nomenclature (SNOP) into a logic-based health care terminology. In
January 2002, SNOMED CT was created by the merger, expansion, and
restructuring of the College of American Pathologists (CAP) SNOMED RT
(Reference Terminology) and the UK National Health Service (NHS)
Clinical Terms (also known as the Read codes). The historical strength
of the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED) was its coverage
of medical specialties, while the strength of Clinical Terms Version 3
was its terminologies for general practice.
SNOMED CT cross maps to such other terminologies as ICD-9-CM, ICD-O3,
ICD-10, Laboratory LOINC and OPCS-4

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-9-CM>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-10>




BillK