Performance Comparison between Two Solutions for Filtering Data Sets with Hierarchical Structures

Performance Comparison between Two Solutions for Filtering Data Sets with Hierarchical Structures

Controlled terminologies with hierarchical structures are utilized widely to code diagnoses (e.g., International Classification of Diseases, ICD) and other medical concepts (e.g., Medical Subject Headings, MeSH) in healthcare data sets. The coded data sets can be useful for advanced statistical analysis or to explore aggregated effects by using multiple data sets across institutions. The analysis of results can be evidence for administrative decisions (e.g., resources allocation) or to validate hypotheses. However, publicly accessible analytic tools for such data sets are lacking. Our research team has developed and published the methods for filtering, analysing and visualizing such data sets. Current work focuses on the development of an online tool to assist other researchers with applying our methods. We report on a comparison of two approaches to developing the tool in order to provide evidence about the selection of tools and programming language.