A Domain-Specific Terminology for Retinopathy of Prematurity and Its Applications in Clinical Settings

Abstract EN

A terminology (or coding system) is a formal set of controlled vocabulary in a specific domain.

With a well-defined terminology, each concept in the target domain is assigned with a unique code, which can be identified and processed across different medical systems in an unambiguous way.

Though there are lots of well-known biomedical terminologies, there is currently no domain-specific terminology for ROP (retinopathy of prematurity).

Based on a collection of historical ROP patients’ data in the electronic medical record system, we extracted the most frequent terms in the domain and organized them into a hierarchical coding system—ROP Minimal Standard Terminology, which contains 62 core concepts in 4 categories.

This terminology has been successfully used to provide highly structured and semantic-rich clinical data in several ROP-related applications.