Applying Evolutionary Terminology Auditing to SNOMED CT
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 4, 2026

Development of Compendium for Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma
Published on: April 12, 2024
1Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, SUNY at Buffalo, NY, USA.
Abstract:
Evolutionary Terminology Auditing is a technique designed to measure quality improvements of terminologies over successive versions. It uses the most recent version of a terminology as a benchmark and assumes that changes in the underlying ontology correspond to changes in either that part of reality that is covered by the terminology, or the authors' understanding - if not the 'state of the art' in general - thereof. Applied to SNOMED CT over 18 versions, it reveals that at the level of the concepts minimal improvements are obtained and that the second assumption holds for far less changes than one would expect. It is recommended that future versions of SNOMED CT provide more explicit documentation for each introduced change.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Evolutionary Relationships through Genome Comparisons
Applications of Molecular Taxonomy
Anatomical Terminology
Modern Molecular Taxonomy
Synteny and Evolution
Around 80 million years ago, the human and mice lineages diverged from the common ancestor. During the course of evolution, the ancestral chromosome underwent...
Comparing Copy Number Variations and SNPs
Copy number variations or CNVs are the structural variations that cover more than 1kb of DNA sequence. The single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), on the other hand, is a single nucleotide change or a point mutation that is found in more than 1%...

