ConvertMedUnits: Convert medical measurements between International Standard...
In gdata: Various R Programming Tools for Data Manipulation

Description Usage Arguments Details Value Author(s) References See Also Examples

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

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

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

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.

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

Gregory R. Warnes greg@warnes.net

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

The data set MedUnits provides the conversion factors.

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)