Medical classification - Definition and Overview

Medical classification systems are used for a variety of applications in medicine and medical informatics

• statistical analysis of diseases and therapeutic actions
• reimbursement e.g. based on DRGs
• knowledge-based and decision support systems
• direct surveillance of epidemic or pandemic outbreaks

List of medical classification systems

This is an incomplete list of classification systems

• International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD)
• Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
• Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (http://www.snomed.org/) which is a multiaxial, hierarchical classification system. So a disease may be located in a body organ which results in a code in a topography axis and may lead to morphological alterations represented by a morphology code
• International Classification of Diseases for Oncology (ICD-O) is a domain specific extension of the ICD for tumor diseases and has two axes: a topography axis for the tumor's site and a morphology axis for the morphology. This classification is widely used by cancer registries
• TNM Classification of Malignant Tumours
• International Classification of Procedures in Medicine (ICPM)
• Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
• Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is under development by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM). It provides a metathesaurus which is built up of several classifications. The metathesaurus contains concepts and relationships between concepts and such can combine knowledge from different classifications and from other types of controlled vocabularies which are not classifications per se. Further information about the UMLS project can be found at http://umlsinfo.nlm.nih.gov/.