RadLex

The radiology lexicon published by the Radiological Society of North America.¹ RadLex is the primary identifier source for OIDM anatomic locations and a common system for finding and attribute value index codes, for example RID28472 for present and RID28473 for absent.

The ontology ships as an OWL file. In the copy read for this knowledgebase it declares roughly 93,900 OWL classes and 46,899 distinct RID identifiers. Anatomy is expressed through OWL restrictions on Has_Part and Part_Of rather than as a separate containment axis. Provenance is carried on a Source annotation holding free text such as “Playbook,” “LOINC,” or “LI-RADS 2020,” and obsolescence through Replaced_by.²

OIDM’s relationship to RadLex runs in both directions. The curated anatomic set exists because RadLex and SNOMED CT alone were judged unsuitable for interoperability, lacking desired terms, carrying degenerate ones, and having limited anatomic organization.³ In the other direction, RSNA issue 3, “Add Anatomic Locations,” is an open upstream tracking issue whose exit criterion is “100% coverage of the Anatomic Locations terminology in RadLex.”⁴

Synonyms and near-synonyms

• Radiology lexicon is the expansion.
• RADLEX is the system string in an index code; http://radlex.org is the URI form used in FHIR.
• RadLex RID is an identifier in RadLex, not the ontology.
• RadLex Playbook is a different artifact; see LOINC/RSNA Radiology Playbook.

Identifier form

RID followed by digits. See RadLex RID.

Where it is used

Ontologies used, RadLex integration, and Anatomic locations and RadLex. RadLex is one of the five terminologies the molu lookup tool spans.⁵

Footnotes

1. RadLex, the RSNA radiology lexicon ↩

2. RadLex baseline verification ↩

3. anatomiclocations.org site homepage ↩

4. RadLex issue 3 ↩

5. med-ontology-lookup README ↩