strokewhether

Strokewhether is a neologism used in medical informatics to describe the process or label indicating whether a patient has experienced a stroke, especially in datasets with incomplete or conflicting information. The term combines stroke with whether to emphasize the decision point about stroke status as a binary variable.

In practice, strokewhether is a data labeling convention rather than a clinical diagnosis. It is used in observational studies, electronic health record phenotyping, and machine‑learning pipelines to flag stroke status and to handle uncertainty. Labels may appear as yes, no, or uncertain, with the uncertain category helping to track data quality and inform sensitivity analyses.

Determination and criteria are context dependent. In some studies, a rule‑based approach uses imaging evidence (CT or MRI showing ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke), explicit clinical diagnoses, and onset timing. In other cases, adjudication by expert reviewers or probabilistic models assigns a strokewhether label or probability.

Limitations include lack of standardization and potential misclassification if criteria differ across datasets, which can affect study conclusions and generalizability. The term remains primarily within research and data curation rather than routine clinical practice.

Related concepts include stroke, medical informatics, electronic health records, ICD‑10 coding, NIHSS, and diagnostic uncertainty.