Visual ICD-10 Codes
Researches in humanities and social sciences (psychology, linguistics, philosophy) indicate that people using more visual information would be more creative and benefit on a larger scale from the power of the human mind. Cross-language communication could get more intuitive then today with conventional text and natural language. Computer technology (information systems, telecommunication, visual tools) in turn promises to provide a wide range of highly effective tools to support visual communication. Putting it differently, there is no reason why information in the future should be recorded only by static text, but rather it is conceivable to build on earlier attempts to construct new artificial languages that are not based on letters, but on icons. It was Otto Neurath who showed with his isotypes that in many aspects symbols are superior to textual representations; a number of attempts to construct full communication systems based on symbols have been developed since.
We developed a set of medical symbols, which can be used in visual representations of medical records, e.g. representing ICD 10 classifications and to build complex medical glyphs. Each of the basic symbols is available in 4 abstraction levels, Our working hypothesis is, that on the one hand detailed visual representations are recognized more easy then simplified versions, and on the other hand the simple version can be perceived and memorized in an faster way, than complex signs.
Figure 1: Basic symbols in different levels of detail.
To prove our hypothesis and to evaluate the perception of the symbols in a medical context we created a web-based evaluation tool covering two perception tests. The first test measures if the meaning of the symbol is recognized, and the second test the (short time) memory duration. The evaluation is currently under progress. Based on the results we plan to further improve the symbols and provide a validated set for public use.
Figure 2: Symbol Meter - Evaluation of medical icons.
The next logical step is to combine basic symbols to create a "visual sentence". Depending on the recipient the basic symbols can be weighted differently. A possible field of application is the depiction of ICD-10 codes. Figure 3 shows the ICD-10 Code C00.5 (Malignant neoplasm of lip, unspecified. The two variants exemplify different usage scenarios, on left side the focus is the cancer disease, e.g. used in a general medical record, where the right symbol can be used, when the context is already restricted.
Figure 3: Visual ICD-10 Codes
website maintained by Marc
Streit and Alexander
Lex
last updated on 2010-07-29