gdata (version 2.7.1)

ConvertMedUnits: 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

Value

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

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 measurment names. If more than one match is found, an error will be generated, along with a list of the matching entries.

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)

# See what happens when there is more than one match
ConvertMedUnits( 27.5, "Creatin", to="US")

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