we are planning to translate the whole body structures hierarchy since this is useful for procedure and finding translations and it is also needed for the EHDS.
I would like to get some insights from other NRCs who have already translated body structures:
When browsing different editions, I can see that some languages translate the “structure” as is, others omit it from the start, and others use the structure description only, e.g.
Spanish: estructura del hígado (PT), hígado (SYN)
Netherlands: structuur van lever (PT), lever, hepar (SYN)
Belgian Dutch: lever (PT), hepar, structuur van lever (SYN)
French: foie (PT), hepar, structure du foie (SYN)
Norwegian: lever (PT)
Korean: 간 (PT)
Finnish: Maksa (PT)
Estonian: Maks, struktuur (PT), Maks (SYN)
Danish: struktur af leveren (PT)
=> Could you provide us with your rationales behind the respective decisions?
Translation approach: Have you any experience how to put together work packages in order to translate the body structures clusterwise? When translating the findings, we created work packages based on the ICD-10 map classification.
Thank you in advance for your help!
Best regards, Annatina
At CSCT level, when we had done our proof of concept for translation of respiratory concepts, we had translated a list of anatomical terms first, based on the medicine academy recommendations, then we had used a custom software we had developed to compose translation proposals for the more precoordinated terms, including all possible synonyms.
We had made translation templates to make sur we got all the same construction rules of variants for similar concepts like the for example for the lobes and bronchi. And once we had done anatomy, we used those anatomical translations as base for the translations of all the findings, disorder and procedure concepts citing those anatomy terms.
Regarding work packages, we had grouped the anatomical terms that made a logical unit, like all the lung parts, all the larynx parts, etc and submitted them to specialists of those regions. This is not necessary for the “basic organs and structures” that about everyone knows how to name but it is necessary for complex tridimensional structures like the larynx, full of planes and folds not every clinician names in daily practice.
Regarding structure and part of, those are parts of the terms that are essential to the meaning in SNOMED anatomical triangle so yes we did translate them, but we put this translation as synonym since clinicians would not be happy to have the structure of X term in a discharge report, they would only want the anatomical structure name.
As Marie-Alexandra says: the structure is necessary to distinguish the structure concepts from their part and entire counterparts. This is why we added the term to our FSN and preferred term. But indeed, it does not make the physicians happy. As the structure concept is the default choice, applicable in most cases, I think it a reasonable choice to leave ‘structure’ out of the preferred term.
in Estonian language we do not translate FSNs and we decided to go with the approach that our et preferred term says if this is a structure or entire concept, For structure concepts we always add “, struktuur” at the end (like in your example for liver “Maks, struktuur”) and for entire concepts we add “X, tervik” (for liver the preferred term is “Maks, tervik”). And both structure and entire concepts, have synonyms without the “, struktuur” / “, tervik” (for liver they both have synonyms “Maks”). In that way there is one clinically useful term for both of them, because we also see that terms with the structure/entire sepcification would not be acceptable for clinicians. When we publish ValueSets in our terminology server and need to use the structure/entire concept, we use synonym as display name not preferred term.
We don’t have any tips or tricks to share for work packages related to body structures (for disorders we have also used the ICD-10 map), but we also need to translate body structures for EHDSi and see that one by one translation will not get us very far. So, thank you very much for raising this topic!
We are not translating the FSN in France, so it was not a relevant factor in our decision-making process regarding body structure.
We are adding the French translations of “entire” and “part of” to all descriptions of the relevant concepts, as these are easily understandable by practitioners and are used less frequently than the structure concepts. Regarding the translation of “structure”, it is only added in one acceptable synonym as it makes no sense to practitioners and they do not want to see the PT altered with this notion.
The only exception so far is vascular, venous and arterial structure. For these concepts, we are keeping the “structure” notion in all the descriptions for semantic reasons. For example, the concept 29092000 |Venous structure (body structure)| has a child 89175004 |Structure of valve of sinus (body structure)|. We are translating 29092000 |Venous structure (body structure)| as “structure veineuse” (venous structure in English) rather than “veine” (vein in English) because the valve is a subpart of the venous structure rather than a more specific type of vein.
Regarding the selection of concepts, we fully agree with Marie-Alexandra that it is easier to create packages of related regions/systems. This will make the translation process easier (rather than having to refer back to previous packages to see how a specific anatomic structure were translated) and ensure consistency.
Like many other countries, we don’t translate the FSN. We translate the PT and put a lot of effort in the synonyms.
In Norway, SNOMED CT is being used as an interface terminology, hence the synonyms we’ve added.
This is also why we have the following approach to the translation of the SEP structure of anatomy in SNOMED CT:
Structure of X: We omit the possible translation “struktur” as it doesn’t provide any necessary semantic information to the end user, probably only confusion - as others have mentioned.
Part of X: We translate this as “del av X”, as this represents the meaning of the concept.
Entire X: We translate this as as “X, som helhet”, which is syntactically a bit odd in Norwegian, but renders the meaning in a clear way.