gdata (version 2.19.0)

MedUnits: Table of conversions between Intertional Standard (SI) and US 'Conventional' Units for common medical measurements.

Description

Table of conversions between Intertional Standard (SI) and US 'Conventional' Units for common medical measurements.

Usage

data(MedUnits)

Format

A data frame with the following 5 variables.

Abbreviation

Common Abbreviation (mostly missing)

Measurement

Measurement Name

ConventionalUnit

Conventional Unit

Conversion

Conversion factor

SIUnit

SI Unit

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 data set provides constants for converting between SI and US 'Conventional' units.

To perform the conversion from SI units to US 'Conventional' units do:

Measurement in ConventionalUnit = (Measurement in SIUnit) / Conversion

To perform conversion from 'Conventional' to SI units do:

Measurement in SIUnit = (Measurement in ConventionalUnit) * Conversion

See Also

The function ConvertMedUnits automates the conversion task.

Examples

data(MedUnits)

# show available conversions
MedUnits$Measurement

# utility function
matchUnits <- function(X) MedUnits[ grep(X, 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 = GlucoseSI / matchUnits("Glucose")$Conversion 
cbind(GlucoseSI,GlucoseUS)

# also consider using ConvertMedUnits()
ConvertMedUnits( GlucoseSI, "Glucose", to="US" )