R: Convert medical measurements between International Standard...

ConvertMedUnits {gdata} | R Documentation

## Convert medical measurements between International Standard (SI) and US 'Conventional' Units.

### Description

Convert Medical measurements between International Standard (SI) and US 'Conventional' Units.

### Usage

    ConvertMedUnits(x, measurement, abbreviation,
                    to = c("Conventional", "SI", "US"),
                    exact = !missing(abbreviation))

### Arguments

`x` | Vector of measurement values
`measurement` | Name of the measurement
`abbreviation` | Measurement abbreviation
`to` | Target units
`exact` | Logicial indicating whether matching should be exact

### Details

Medical laboratories and practitioners in the United States use one set of units (the so-called 'Conventional' units) for reporting the results of clinical laboratory measurements, while the rest of the world uses the International Standard (SI) units. It often becomes necessary to translate between these units when participating in international collaborations.

This function converts between SI and US 'Conventional' units.

If `exact=FALSE`, `grep` will be used to do a case-insensitive sub-string search for matching measurement names. If more than one match is found, an error will be generated, along with a list of the matching entries.

### Value

Returns a vector of converted values. The attribute 'units' will contain the target units converted.

### Author(s)

Gregory R. Warnes greg@warnes.net

### References

http://www.globalrph.com/conv_si.htm

### See Also

The data set `MedUnits` provides the conversion factors.

### Examples

    data(MedUnits)

    # show available conversions
    MedUnits$Measurement

    # Convert SI Glucose measurement to 'Conventional' units
    GlucoseSI = c(5, 5.4, 5, 5.1, 5.6, 5.1, 4.9, 5.2, 5.5) # in SI Units
    GlucoseUS = ConvertMedUnits( GlucoseSI, "Glucose", to="US" )
    cbind(GlucoseSI,GlucoseUS)

    ## Not run:
    # See what happens when there is more than one match
    ConvertMedUnits( 27.5, "Creatin", to="US")

    ## End(Not run)

    # To solve the problem do:
    ConvertMedUnits( 27.5, "Creatinine", to="US", exact=TRUE)

[Package gdata version 2.18.0 Index]