A Russian version of SNOMED-International

Medical information systems are becoming widely used in Russia--most of them based on small- and medium-sized networks of PCUs running xBASE software. The major difficulty facing these systems is not the availability of adequate hardware and software, but rather the absence of standard terminology. The only international standard currently in use is the Russian translation of ICD-9. Development, adoption, and promotion of other international classifications and nomenclatures could remedy this situation. SNOMED-International [1] appeared to be well-suited for adaptation to the Russian medical environment because of its multiaxial structure and rich terminology. Its use could also facilitate international as well as national data collection and cooperative studies, and it may find its first application in a planned correlation of toxicology and autopsy data from the Leningrad region. Since the complete SNOMED-International contains more than 130,000 terms, the first phase of this project is restricted to the translation of the SNOMED-International Microglossary, a subset of 12,500 pathology-related diagnoses and descriptive terms. Each term was given up to three Russian equivalents which were entered in a database. Then all the Russian terms were printed, edited, and their corrections were entered in the same database. This core set of the Russian terms will be continuously updated and expanded as it is used in actual coding applications. The procedure will be as follows: if a phrase is encountered that could not be mapped to a term in the current version of the Russian nomenclature, the complete SNOMED lexicon will be searched manually for an English equivalent, its code applied to a Russian term, and this term will then be added to the Russian SNOMED database. This approach has the advantage that most of the terms in the Russian nomenclature will not be apriori translations from English, but will arise from the original texts found in real documents. This project is now in progress; the translation of the SNOMED-International Microglossary has been completed. The more difficult task of developing procedures for parsing free text sentences and updating the nomenclature is under development.