Term choice for SNOMED Veterinary

Vocabulary Users
1

What is the process for determining which SNOMED Veterinary terms are displayed in Athena. For example, Veterinary Extension of SNOMED CT (VetSCT) concept Canine distemper (disorder) (SCTID:351341000009101, OMOP ConceptID:42573037) in Athena is display as Old-dog encephalitis, despite “Canine distemper” being the preferred term in the VetSCT.
Other Examples:

VetSCT: Feline leukemia virus infection (SCTID: 334421000009101)
Athena: Feline visceral lymphoma AND/OR leukaemia (OMOP ConceptID: 42572583)

VetSCT: Feline lower urinary tract disease (SCTID: 352621000009109)
Athena: Feline idiopathic cystitis (OMOP ConceptID: 42573089)

Could you provide insight into the criteria used for term selection in Athena? This is causing some confusion as veterinary institutions are using Athena to search and map their data. I assume given the search returns that I see, that only one term is chosen for each concept and certainly understand not having the bandwidth to deal with multiple synonyms in the OMOP vocabulary system, but I would expect the term marked preferred to be the chose term.

It would appear that language refset information may not be taken into account with the VetSCT content as it appears to be with core SNOMED content (I see Language and additional synonym information for SNOMED content, but not VetSCT content). Is there something that we can do or provide to have that information included for the veterinary content? I think that is likely the root of the issue.

Thank you<

Julie Green
VTS - VMCVM

2

Hi Julie,

The choice of preferred term is usually defined in the load_stage script. The script looks into the source and takes a preferred term as a concept name and puts other term variants into the concept_synonym table.
However, I see that script for SNOMED Veterinary requires improvement, as it doesn’t refer to the source table in a proper way.

We haven’t implemented any SNOMED Veterinary code improvements during this release, but this issue can be fixed during the next planned vocabulary refresh. Please, feel free to reach out to me if you need any help fixing this.

Best,
Masha