Are all Deprecated codes from Loinc.csv included in the 2020AA hierarchical tree

Legacy general-discussion
1

LOINC 2.68 version released in June 2020 has 3723 Deprecated codes. To my understanding the LOINC codes are never deleted but retained for historical purposes. Some codes like 1045 -4, 1046-2, 1047-0, 1048-8, 1049-6, 1050-4 and their strings are not present in the Hierarchical tree. Some of their MAP-TO codes like 1042-1, 1043-9 are present. So, if a code is superseded by a another one, does the older deprecated term become invisible in the tree?

2

The Multi-axial hierarchy should contain all 93,600 LOINC terms from the 2.68 release. The LOINC codes you mentioned are located around line 117840 of the file as shown in the screen shot below.

Here are screen shots showing the terms in multiaxial hierarchy in RELMA

 

 

Happy LOINCing,

John

3

Thank you so much. Appreciate your time and effort.

4

I have one more question: How the Deprecated codes are represented in the LOINC tree? - Till 2019AB those codes are prefixed with “Deprecated” and included under LAB.NOTYETCATEG. In 2020AA, they are represented by their Display Name which is not showing its Deprecated Status.

Is there a tag for Deprecated codes in the new version? It would be great if you could explain about this.

Thanks,

Malar

5

The MultiAxialHierarchyReadMe.txt file that is included in the download describes the format of the MultiAxialHierachy.csv file in great detail. This file does not include the status field. The status of a LOINC term is shown in the STATUS field in the Loinc.csv, Loinc.mdb, or LoincTableCore.csv file. All of these files are available as free downloads from our website.

Happy LOINCing

6

Thank you.

7

Hi Malar,

To add to John’s reply, the Multiaxialhierarchy.csv file does not contain a separate field for LOINC term status. However, the names of the deprecated terms in the file are still prefixed with “Deprecated” as you can see in John’s first screenshot above. They might have moved from the LAB.NOTYETCATEG node, but they should still have the prefix.

Also, 2019AB and 2020AA are version numbers for the UMLS. Are you looking at LOINC content in the UMLS? I wonder if that is why you are seeing different information. UMLS 2020AA contains LOINC content from our 2.67 release published in December 2019 - see https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/sourcereleasedocs/current/LNC/metadata.html.

The latest release of LOINC is 2.68 and was published a few weeks ago, but that content is not currently available in the UMLS.