| Home | IPCMR Concepts | Scheme Concepts |
Impatient readers can go straight here to view the content as HTML.
This resource provides a mapping between various different standard schemes for describing (primarily diagnostic) imaging procedures.
The current intent is to define the union of all pre-coordinated concepts that may be used for requesting/ordering imaging procedures, establish commonality between schemes and to identify gaps, inconsistencies or problems in existing schemes such that they may be improved. The IPCMR is not intended to be a substitute for more ambitious mappings, such as that provided by the NLM UMLS, but rather to augment them to the extent that they are currently lacking (e.g., most SNOMED and LOINC imaging procedure codes in UMLS are not linked and are assigned different CUIDs).
The goal is to identify a comprehensive and complete set of pre-coordinated coded concepts for clinically-oriented operational activities, particularly ordering, appropriateness decision support, protocoling and reporting. It is not the goal to support coding for utilization or reimbursement.
A presentation describing the project is:
Clunie DA. Towards a Global Imaging Procedure Code Mapping Resource. Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) 2015 Annual Meeting. Washington, DC; 2015/05/29. doi:10.13140/RG.2.1.3904.9688
The abstract of the presentation can be found on the SIIM site and the slides are available here.
Some of the standard schemes mapped are specifically targeted towards requesting/ordering diagnostic imaging procedures (e.g., RadLex) or appropriateness criteria (e.g., ACR Common). Some schemes address different types of procedures, not just imaging, and only the imaging codes of those have been extracted (e.g., LOINC). Other schemes are more general in coverage, but do contain imaging codes (e.g., SNOMED). Some are focused only on billing and reimbursement (e.g., HCPCS), and are included to the extent that they provide insight into the scope of procedures, and are often repurposed or abused for non-billing purposes or have a historical impact on the content of other schemes.
The standard schemes (referred to as "source schemes"), some of which are more mature than others, include (in alphabetical order):
The versions of the various different sources used are listed here. For schemes that not yet officially released, or are in a state of flux, several different versions may be mapped for the same scheme.
The IPCMR is provided for viewing in HTML and download in CSV formats.
The IPCMR concept table lists only concepts that have been entirely canonicalized (no unrecognized source scheme attributes or term words) and have a Modality defined, is currently mapped to one or more source scheme contents. The source scheme code mapped is hyperlinked to another page describing the source scheme content and version(s) used, which may include as yet partially canonicalized or unmapped concepts. These tables are useful for iteratively improving the mapping process (particularly with respect to the unmapped term components shown in lowercase).
Be warned that the pages and the tables they contain are very large and may not be suitable for browsing on platforms with limited resources.
The individual attributes and values used in the canonicalized "model" (if one can grace it with the term) are enumerated in the attribute table.
The IPCMR is a work in progress, and has not yet reached a level of stability and comprehensiveness such that it is reliable enough for most production purposes.
In particular there has not yet been sufficient manual curation to assure that the automatically generated mappings are semantically correct.
That said, as of the first public release, for content currently or previously defined in any particular release:
I.e., the intent is that if you use IPCMR codes, having satisfied yourself that the definition is "correct", then they will remain stable, even though the exact form of the canonicalized representation and/or the synthesized definition may evolve over time.
The attributes and values used in the canonicalized representation in particular are likely to change significantly once the priority of the project shifts from achieving unique canonicalization to a more consistent and rational approach to modeling and are mapped to (or added as) atomic concepts in other lexicons and ontologies.
Feedback is sought on any aspect of the utility, usability, form or content of the mapping resource. Comments about any content that is incorrectly mapped is especially valuable. Please contact info@pixelmed.com.
It is expected that users and implementers will normally use the source schemes for encoding in operational systems, and it is not the intent that the IPCMR be treated as "yet another coding scheme".
However, given that it is inevitable that there will be some applications in which it is desired to do so, whether for operational or research reasons, because some source schemes are in draft form and should not be used yet or because it is desired to mix and match concepts from different schemes in the same value set (which some standards prohibit or make difficult), the mechanisms to encode in an interoperable manner are defined, reluctantly.
It is recommended that the value "99IPCMR" be used as the
and that "1.3.6.1.4.1.5962.98.2" be used as the
The source scheme organizations retain ownership of the codes, definitions, descriptions and internal relationships in their schemes, so anyone using or contributing to the IPCMR should assure themselves that they are abiding by any licenses, agreements or other arrangements required by those organizations.
PixelMed disclaims any responsibility to enforce any restrictions on IPCMR users with the respect to their use of content from the source schemes.
In principle, the intent is for the IPCMR itself to be "open source" to the extent that such content may be described as such, without compromising the rights of owners of content of the source schemes.
The IPCMR content itself, including mappings, canonical definitions, relationships, models and synthesized terms is owned by PixelMed Publishing, LLC. PixelMed grants in perpetuity a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use the IPCMR content itself for any purpose.
This content is provided by the copyright holders and contributors "as is" and any express or implied warranties, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are disclaimed. In no event shall the copyright owner or contributors be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of use, data or profits; or business interruption) however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of this content, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.
This content has neither been tested nor approved for clinical use or for incorporation in a medical device. It is the redistributor's or user's responsibility to comply with any applicable local, state, national or international regulations.
For further information contact info@pixelmed.com.
Last updated: Mon Jul 16 14:55:55 EDT 2018
Copyright ©2018 by PixelMed Publishing, LLC
| Home | IPCMR Concepts | Scheme Concepts |