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QUDT -Quantities, Units, Dimensions and dataTypes - public repository
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Cell Counts - best way to represent using QUDT #774

Closed glow-mdsol closed 9 months ago

glow-mdsol commented 9 months ago

In Hematology Panels, there are a number of Cell Counts; (eg White Blood Cells/Red Blood Cells in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2263/table/ch1.T1/) - the units for these are usually some exponent for the 'absolute' count of cells per unit volume (eg 10^9/L or 10^3/mm^3); are the best units for these the NUM-PER-{VOL} or would it be worth adding a dedicated CELLS-PER-{VOL} with a dedicated Quantity kind? Conversions in these cases are almost always orders of magnitude (where the count or volume scale up or down). This would also include the UCUM /LPF and /HPF 'units'

steveraysteveray commented 9 months ago

I don't think creating a dedicated unit and quantity kind buys you anything. Ultimately the nature of CELLS-PER-\<some volume> is the same as NUM-PER-\<some volume>. They would both have a quantity kind of quantitykind:NumberDensity. The fact that you have exponential numbers is no problem. In fact, I'm currently re-testing our handling of 1.234E15 representations of numbers with the OWL schema (it's fine with SHACL). Pending my tests, I see no reason why the values of your quantities can not expressed with powers of 10.

glow-mdsol commented 9 months ago

Thanks!