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Surgical Robot-Assisted Transanal Specimen Extraction Radical Sigmoidectomy Without an Auxiliary Abdominal Incision
Published on: June 13, 2025
Exploring the ontology of surgical procedures in the Read Thesaurus
C Price1, M O'Neil, T E Bentley
1NHS Centre for Coding and Classification, Loughborough, United Kingdom. cprice@l-boro.demon.co.uk
Abstract:
The Read Thesaurus is a comprehensive user-led clinical vocabulary developed from earlier, and structurally simpler, versions of the Read Codes, with substantial input from United Kingdom health care professionals. A constituent template table underpins a range of functions, including semantic definition of concepts using object-attribute-value triples. Concept representation for surgical procedures has been investigated by a number of groups and a standard European structure has been proposed. Over 50% of the surgical procedures in the Read Thesaurus have been fully characterised using a number of attributes each with a defined concept field. We report progress to date and, based on our large-scale experience, examine the applicability of the European model to a user-defined terminology.
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