January 2020 Early Visibility Release Notices - Planned changes to upcoming SNOMED International Release packages

Revision of IS A relationships for anatomy concepts 

Improvement for the representation of role groups

It is important to clearly indicate if an attribute is grouped or not because role grouping has impact to semantics and classification results. The majority of the Modeling Advisory Group members recommended explicit representation for role groups. There will be two key improvements for representation in the July 2019 release. The changes are demonstrated in the January 2019 Demo release package.

Firstly, role groups are explicitly stated and represented by the concept 609096000|Role group (attribute)| as an object property in the OWL axiom refset.

Secondly, for the inferred relationship file, role group 0 will be only applied to attributes that are not logically grouped, e.g. not a value of 609096000|Role group (attribute)| in an OWL axiom or grouped = 0 in the MRCM. This addresses the potential confusion whether an attribute is grouped or not in the role group 0. 

The improvements will provide consistent representation for role groups in the OWL axioms, inferred relationship file, and diagramming of the concept model.

MRCM Changes

MRCM changes in the July 2019 release

An update on changes for the January 2020 release will be posted here as soon as it is available.

Quality Initiative

Information about the project can found here - Quality Initiative - Progress

Note: There are changes to the Service Level Agreement for the CRS as a result of the Quality Initiative:

https://www.snomed.org/SNOMED/media/SNOMED/documents/Early-Visibility-of-Changes-to-Service-Level-Agreement-International-Content-Request-Service-(CRS).pdf

WAS_A

Inactivation reason of LIMITED/WAS_A is not allowed for any new content inactivations after the July 2018 release. The WAS_A association refset has not been updated thereafter.

At the Editorial Advisory Group meeting in April 2019, agreement was reached to discontinue the maintenance of WAS_A relationships when inactivating concepts that have a historical association to an inactive concept. When changes are made to a historical relationship for a concept that was previously inactivated using WAS_A, effort will be made to assign a new historical relationship that facilitates traceability of the concept (e.g. DUPLICATE or AMBIGUOUS) as opposed to NON-CONFORMANCE TO EDITORIAL POLICY.

Existing WAS_A relationships will be inactivated in a future release once a plan for batch reassignment of historical relationships has been developed. Until then, SNOMED International will not continue to use or maintain WAS_A relationships.

Known Content Issues July 2019 Release

Approximately 149 text definitions are missing either a US or GB spelling variation. These are all legacy issues that will be rectified in the January 2020 release.

A small set of disorder concepts have been identified with descendants that have a semantic tag of clinical finding. A further small set of concepts have been identified that have a semantic tag of disorder but are not descendants of 64572001|Disease (disorder)|. These concepts are all legacy issues that will be rectified in the January 2020 release.

Release validation rules have been enhanced to prevent recurrence of legacy issues for future content additions.

Changes for 'On examination' (O/E) and 'Complaining of' (C/O) concepts

Jan 2020 release: Review of O/E and C/O content expected to result in the addition of approximately 230 new concepts as replacements. 

July 2020 release: Inactivation of the O/E and C/O content (Batch change) for return to the UK, number to be confirmed. 

Inactivation of 23583003 |Inflammation (morphologic abnormality)

In order to distinguish inflammatory process from structure, 23583003 |Inflammation (morphologic abnormality)| has been Inactivated as DUPLICATE, SAME AS 409774005 |Inflammatory morphology (morphologic abnormality)|.

All concepts in the Inflammatory disorder hierarchy have been remodeled accordingly. 

IACR have released ICD-O-3.2 as a listing of all new additions, changes and revisions to ICD-O-3.1 in Excel format. The new version, ICD-O-3.2, is recommended for use from 2020.  ICD-O-3.2 is not yet available online or in book format. In preparation for the update, the changes have been divided into types and are being investigated/addressed in the ICD-O-3.2 update project. The priority is being given to those that have an impact on clinical safety, e.g., changes of behaviour (benign, malignant etc.) and adding new content for SNOMED CT morphologies, this refers to the 400177003 |Neoplasm and/or hamartoma (morphologic abnormality)| hierarchy.

The descriptions with [obs] have been inactivated as outdated because they are artefacts of descriptions from the ICD-O-3 print version for their history tracking. 

The maps to ICD-O-3.1 are being updated only for error correction purposes for the January 2020 release. The maps to ICD-O-3.2 are out of scope for the January 2020 release and are planned for a future release.

Over the Counter

Concepts referring to “over the counter” status have been inactivated. 

Concepts referring to regulatory status or characterization (e.g. over the counter) are out of scope for the International Release since the meaning may vary by jurisdiction and is not consistent internationally.

Vaccine Poisoning

Concepts referring to vaccine poisoning have been inactivated with historical relationships to the corresponding Adverse reaction caused by X vaccine and to Adverse reaction caused by vaccine constituent.

The notion of vaccine poisoning has persisted in ICD 10 under T50 but it is not included in ICD-11; the poisoning aspect seemingly referred to the adjuvants and carriers that are included in the vaccines as opposed to the biological component itself.

Revision of 298180004 |Finding of range of joint movement (finding)

The concepts under the subhierarchy 298180004 |Finding of range of joint movement (finding)| are being remodeled to represent the finding site of <<785818007 |Structure of joint region (body structure)| instead of <<39352004 |Joint structure (body structure)|. 

Range of movement of a joint region can be impacted by both bone and soft tissues, therefore the use of 39352004 |Joint structure (body structure)| was too restrictive and caused issues in other areas of the terminology.  These changes will be made over the course of two releases due to the number of affected concepts.

Concrete domains and numeric representation

Numerics are represented by concepts in the Medicinal product concept model in SNOMED CT, which is an interim solution before the implementation of concrete domains to support data types, such as decimal, integer, string and date/time. The implementation of concrete domains depends on the OWL expression reference set and the update of inferred relationship file. The first complete OWL expression refset will be available in the July 2019 international release. It will take time to update the specification for the inferred relationship file and consult with the community of practice. When they are ready, strength in medicinal product model can be transformed to concrete domains. The transformation will be completed by technical changes without impact to classification results.

Replacement of the Stated Relationship files with the new OWL Axiom refset files

A set of documentations has been developed to support the Logic Profile Enhancements. 

• SNOMED DL Profile Enhancements
• SNOMED CT Logic Profile Specification
• SNOMED CT OWL Guide (OWL Refsets specification)
• Snomed OWL Toolkit - https://github.com/IHTSDO/snomed-owl-toolkit
• Classifying SNOMED CT using the Snomed OWL Toolkit - https://youtu.be/-91egY9mJqA
• Creating an OWL file containing SNOMED CT - https://youtu.be/sfFbMMioA_4

For any questions, please contact SNOMED International at support@snomed.org with “OWL Axiom refset files implementation question” in the subject line.