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Standard Concepts and maximum depth/distance

Vocabulary Users
#1

@Christian_Reich and others, I would like to revive a question for hopefully a final time.

I believe it has been firmly established that if a concept is not standard by default, its standard mapping should be no more than one hop away via the concept relationship table and the “maps_to” record type. We have a local member of the OHDSI community who implemented a depth first search through the graph and found that a good amount of concepts that are used in our EHR/OHDSI implementation are found further away than expected. (two-three hops)

  1. If a concept is not one hop away should we be making choices on our own by traversing the graph? Medicine and/or clinical terms are not procedural so we worry that the search mechanism may lead to poor choices. As @cukarthik mentions we may be stumbling into a certain amount of semantic drift.

  2. We would be happy to list the concepts based on frequency if you are interested. If some concepts that are indeed further away than expected this list may help your team to address unexpected holes in the vocab.
    Either way, your direction is greatly appreciated,
    David Blatt

#2

I gave up on that long ago. It will all come back. Always does. The community is bottomless. :smiley:

Can you give me an example? Because we fixed this problem about a year ago. All “Maps to” relationships should be direct. If after a refresh it turns out that a bunch of Concepts died and you now got second or higher order graphs there is a special query that shortcuts them all down to single hops. How old is the vocabulary you are using there?

Let me know.

#3

Hi @Christian_Reich

Thank you. Actually, I believe it is indeed a dead issue. I am still reviewing but the instance showing standard concepts with depth > 1 was actually using a stale file. Our current load reflects your statement. We are going to review/confirm then let you know if there are any additional findings. Good news!

David

@cukarthik

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