leafs in the MESH tree

Question

[Quak]

Here, https://meshb.nlm.nih.gov/treeView - there is a tree that by clicking on each leaf one can get further down. I am trying to get the list of all the lowest level (leafs) of this tree. For example all the leafs under "diseases[C]".

I have downloaded the meshDB from ftp://nlmpubs.nlm.nih.gov/online/mesh/MESH_FILES/xmlmesh/ - but I don't see any corresponding entries, I appreciate if you give me a hint,

Answer 1

[Andrzej Zielezinski]

MeSH trees are stored in the ftp://nlmpubs.nlm.nih.gov/online/mesh/MESH_FILES/meshtrees/mtrees2020.bin text file. However, you need to parse the file to get all the leaves.

Few lines from the mtrees2020.bin file:

Infections;C01
Aneurysm, Infected;C01.069
Arthritis, Infectious;C01.100
Arthritis, Reactive;C01.100.500

For example, Aneurysm, Infected;C01.069 is a leaf. It is a child of C01 and 069 has no children.

[Quak]

I thought bin stands for binary ! so didn't really inspect the content ! thank you.

[Andrzej Zielezinski]

Agree, the .bin extension is misleading.