Thanks, Khader. I thought that you would have something to contribute on this topic.
Colleagues in our Computer Science department are developing a tool which identifies genes and medical terms taken from MeSH headings and its hierarchy (category C). I suppose that this in some way could be described as identifying co-morbidities and the responsible genes, but there are other things that they're also trying to solve.
I suggested that they also try to link the disease terms to symptoms whether they be external (eg, skin rash), invasive (eg, red blood cell count) or clinical (eg, results of a culture). However, no one present knew of a digital database linking symptoms to MeSH disease headings (category C), or anything similar.
Thus, we'd be grateful for any pointers or advice on this topic.
5 answers
Not exactly a database solution, but a set of terminologies related to clinical symptoms / clinical procedures / classification of diseases are routinely used in biomedical informatics projects like the one you explained.
- International Classification of
Disease (ICD) codes, current
release is ICD-10
- Systematized
Nomenclature of Medicine--Clinical
Terms (SNOMED-CT)
- Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes
These terminologies were already mapped or can be mapped to MeSH terms.
See manuscript describing mapping of SNOMED-CT to MeSH here and ICD-9 to MeSH here.
Thank you, Alex. These are good points to pass to my colleagues.
I am cross posting from my reply from another post. Have a look at the Human symptoms–disease network. All the disease-symptoms relationships identified from text mining on Pubmed meta data and mapped to MeSH are in the supplementary data set 3.
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