Disease Classification

Whilst the WHO International Classification of Disease and other similar systems for medical coding are routinely used to classify diseases and other health problems in the living and recent dead, they are less well suited to palaeopathological case examples from archaeology and medical history.

was set up to digitally document examples of chronic diseases of the human skeleton and create accurate 3D models of fragile bone specimens for research and educational purposes. From the outset we recognised that needed a clear way of assigning pathological type specimens to a hierarchical structure of distinct disease categories that would make both intuitive sense to users searching the resource and structural sense in terms of database management throughout the project. The resulting structure for disease classification evolved through many iterations during the project. Version 10.0 of the classification system can be downloaded here.