...

JCA said he had been working on the topic for some years. He had found some semi-duplicated morphological structures in abnormalities that were acquired versus those existing from birth. They were essentially the same but just in different sub-hierarchies. For example, absence vs. congenital absence. One was present without saying when and one was present since birth. His desire was to remove and use the occurrence hierarchy or clinical course, but that would not work. There had to be some way of specifically saying that it was developmental in nature and not acquired. So after doing some testing, he found that there was a pathological process called pathologic development process, but it was not in the pathologic process attribute, the current range. He then did some testing to see if it allowed it to be in the range and to allow the use of non-developmental morphology and still end up with the same embryogenesis morphology. It seemed to work. That, he said, would allow them to retire an entire subhierarchy of morphology. So his question was about the resistance to expanding the pathological range. Did anyone have some insight into that resistance? 

GRE said there had been a number of problems with the pathological process about 10 years ago and that was why the usage and range were so limited. He said maybe it would work in JCA's case, but it might require more testing. JCA acknowledged that some instances such as cases of inflammation were both a pathologic process and a morphology, and the guidance as been that you should not use the pathological process when morphology was there. JCA explained that he did not have a process with that, but he did have objections to creating an entire subhierarchy to get around using the pathological process.

GRE said it would be interesting to see examples. JCA said he had taken on a project of revamping the pathological process and this example would probably make him go back and look at it rather than extending the pathological process willy nilly.

BGO said he had added pathological processes in the past and did not think they were a cause of duplicative causitive agents.

Adjournment

JCA said the next 3 items had to be skipped. He mentioned an informational item from the agenda: 

"In order to support the use of qualifier values for nominal results reporting in laboratory and other clinical domains, the range of values allowed for the HAS INTERPRETATION relationship will be extended beyond << 260245000 | Findings values (qualifier value) |. The initial extension will be < 263714004 | Colors (qualifier value) |. Additional subhierarchies will be added as necessary to support specific international use cases submitted by members."

JCA encouraged the AG members to add comments to the discussion pages, he thanked everyone, and adjourned the meeting after 90 minutes.