Valid values

Clinical (archive)
1

I have a doubt about valid values (or ranges) for clinical data. Has
clinical sense to define a range with discontinuous domain?
I am thinking if something like 'critical range' with [-100, 0] and
[100, 200] makes sense at all. Or maybe something like 'any positive
or negative number but zero' ]-inf,0[ & ]0,+inf[
I am not talking about normal or reference ranges, but more on the
kind of ranges that are currently being archetyped

2

At the moment there is the possibility to define intervals like the following (from the ADL spec):

Examples of 2-sided intervals include:

  • length matches {|1000|} – point interval of 1000 (=fixed value)

  • length matches {|950..1050|} – allow 950 - 1050

  • length matches {|0..1000|} – allow 0 - 1000

  • length matches {|0..<1000|} – allow 0>= x <1000

  • length matches {|0>..<1000|} – allow 0> x <1000

  • length matches {|100+/-5|} – allow 100 +/- 5, i.e. 95 - 105

  • rate matches {|0..infinity|} – allow 0 - infinity, i.e. same as >= 0
    Examples of one-sided intervals include:

  • length matches {|<10|} – allow up to 9

  • length matches {|>10|} – allow 11 or more

  • length matches {|<=10|} – allow up to 10

  • length matches {|>=10|} – allow 10 or more
    The Interval type doesn’t cope with sets of intervals, i.e. disjoint intervals, and I am not sure that it should directly. If there was a need, we would probably define a new kind of type allowing disjoint intervals. But… is there a real need?

  • thomas

3

That was exactly my question :slight_smile:
I can see something like the 'critical range' that I defined earlier
being used. If you want to build archetypes about "wrong" status it is
quite possible that you want to define disjoint intervals (if you have
a range of "healthy" values, then the inverse disjoint interval lets
you define the "unhealthy" range)

4

it can be done in current ADL/AOM as follows:

some_attr matches {
DV_QUANTITY [at0001] matches {
magnitude matches {|-200..-100|}
}
DV_QUANTITY [at0002] matches {
magnitude matches {|100..300|}
}
}

The above means that the two DV_QUANTITYs are alternatives for the single-valued attribute some_attr (and effectively the same even if some_attr is a container). So values like -50, 0, + 50 will all fail the above constraints.

Is this close enough to what you want?

  • thomas