Skip to main content

Miscellaneous Notes

The “Quantified Self” refers to practices that use personal data to learn about one’s health, behavior, or environment. A useful self-tracking practice starts with a question the data can help answer — This was/is a Big Thing in HCI.

Columbia P&S was one of the first places to adopt an EHR system.

DBMI was a formal department in 1994 and is the second oldest (oldest is University of Utah all the way back in 1972!)

The Fitzpatrick Scale measures skin tones from 1-6.

RDF and Turtle​

Resource Description Framework (RDF) allows you to think of things and their relationships via the idea of a triple, a tuple of <Subject,Predicate,Object><\text{Subject}, \text{Predicate}, \text{Object}>. It is a specifiction.

Turtle is a syntactic expression of the RDF specifiction. Now Alice knows Bob and Carol. Here it is in triples:

Alice → type → Person
Alice → name → "Alice"
Alice → knows → Bob
Alice → knows → Carol

Here it is in explicit Turtle:

ex:alice rdf:type ex:Person .
ex:alice ex:name "Alice" .
ex:alice ex:knows ex:bob .
ex:alice ex:knows ex:carol .

Short form:

ex:alice
    a ex:Person ;
    ex:name "Alice" ;
    ex:knows ex:bob, ex:carol .

You use SPARQL to query RDF graphs. You use OWL to define ontologies and reasoning rules: categories, relationships, and logical meaning.

Here’s a lot more about RDF Turtle in an interactive tutorial.

Questions​

  • What makes ICD10 a “statistical” classification system?
  • When does an institution decide to ‘upgrade’ from ICD10 → 11?
  • What if there’s stuff missing in the codes?
  • Is FHIR basically “a RESTful specifiction for health data”? Looks like it.
    • How orthodox is it? How are allowed deviations specified (if at all)?
  • Does FHIR actually capture a diagnosis?