You may use either hierachical navigation of the ICD-9-CM Tabular List or search over the Alphabetic Index. Note the search is on the index only (not the tabular list) with the results appearing alphabetically (no relevancy ranking).

Rudimentary spelling correction is provided for search input. To see this in action try wernike afasia. We don't do any stemming as yet, and we don't correct for typographical errors. All the corrections are over a word list produced from the ICD-9-CM data.

Interpreting the Result Formats

Here's some simple notes on ICD-9-CM which may help explain the basics of the result formats.

In the search results, when two codes are required to indicate etiology and manifestation, the manifestation code appears in brackets, e.g., diabetic cataract 250.5X [366.41]. The etiology code is always sequenced first followed by the manifestation code.

NEC - Not elsewhere classifiable. The category number for the term including NEC is to be used only when the coder lacks the information necessary to code the term to a more specific category.

NOS - Not otherwise specified. This abbreviation is the equivalent of "unspecified."

[ ] - Brackets are used to enclose synonyms, alternative wordings, or explanatory phrases.

() - Parentheses are used to enclose supplementary words which may be present or absent in the statement of a disease or procedure without affecting the code number to which it is assigned.

: - Colons are used in the Tabular List after an incomplete term which needs one or more of the modifiers which follow in order to make it assignable to a given category.

For more information see the National Center for Health Statistics from which the data was obtained.

Footnote

We basically did this to experiment with PHP although the data preparation was done in Java. There's no db, just files.