February 4, 2010

This directory contains data files with controlled terminology used by the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Devices and Radiological
Health (CDRH) and maintained as distinct terminology subsets in NCI Thesaurus.

Three sets of CDRH terminology are covered by these files:
1. Medical Device Component Or Accessory Terminology FDA CDRH 
2. Medical Device Problem Codes FDA CDRH 
3. Patient Problem Codes FDA CDRH 

Important Changes to Data Formats

Starting with 2009-09-27, FDA changed data formats several times to provide
additional information on FDA term parents and other data beyond the initial
format used for other FDA terminology sets.  Earlier files are in an "Original
Format" subdirectory of the Archive directory.

2009-12-28 (NCIt 09.12d) starts a simplified format, dropping the previous
columns M-O and making remaining column names more consistent.  Also dropped
are the first two rows that previously gave version information, now found in
the tab name and dated version naming.
 
Contents - Files:

FDA-CDRH_NCIt_Subsets.txt   (CDRH subsets in NCI Thesaurus: tabbed text)
FDA-CDRH_NCIt_Subsets.xls   (CDRH subsets in NCI Thesaurus: Excel)
ReadMe.txt                  (this file)

Contents - Directories:

Archive                     (dated versions of all files, including current)

Background:

Additional documentation, data files, and related information are 
available on this Web page:
     http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/terminologyresources/FDA