Building an Ontology for Traditional Medicine by Comparing Traditional Medicine Information of Chapter 26 of ICD-11 with SNOMED CT

Abstract

Chapter 26 of the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11-CH26) has introduced Traditional Medicine knowledge for use and integration with Western Medicine. Traditional Medicine is the use of beliefs, theories, and experiences to provide healing and care. The amount of information on Traditional Medicine in Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terms (SCT), the world’s most comprehensive health terminology, is unclear. The purpose of this study is to address this unclarity and investigate to which extent the concepts of ICD-11-CH26 can be found in SCT. If a concept from ICD-11-CH26 has a corresponding, or similar, concept in SCT, the hierarchical structure of the concepts has been compared. Then, an ontology of Traditional Chinese Medicine using the concepts of SCT will be developed.