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"Unclassified cardiomyopathy" (MONDO:0016343) — OUT_OF_SCOPE

Date: 2026-09-03 Concept: MONDO:0016343 — obsolete unclassified cardiomyopathy Decision: OUT_OF_SCOPE. No kb/disorders/ entry, no kb/groupings/ entry, and no stubs/ file.

Why this note exists rather than an entry

A curation request came in for "obsolete unclassified cardiomyopathy". The concept resolves to a real MONDO identifier, so it is not a hallucination, but it is not curatable and should not be re-nominated. This note records the determination so the next person to meet the term does not repeat the work.

What MONDO says

MONDO:0016343 is deprecated. Its metadata is unambiguous:

Property Value
rdfs:label obsolete unclassified cardiomyopathy
owl:deprecated true
obsolescence reason (IAO:0000231) OMO:0001000 — out of scope
oio:consider MONDO:0004994 (cardiomyopathy)
tracker (IAO:0000233) monarch-initiative/mondo#2824
oio:inSubset ordo_group_of_disorders, disease_grouping
skos:exactMatch ORDO:217678

Two things follow. First, MONDO's own recorded reason for retiring the term is out of scope — the same judgement this note is making, reached independently by the ontology it would have been bound to. The MONDO ticket obsoleted it as a "too general/non-specific grouping class". Second, the term was never a disease: both of its subsets mark it as a group of disorders, inherited from the Orphanet classification, where "unclassified cardiomyopathy" is the residual bucket for forms that fit none of the morphofunctional categories.

The term is also structurally uncurateable here. MONDO:0016343 is detached from the hierarchy:

$ runoak -i sqlite:obo:mondo ancestors MONDO:0016343
id              label
MONDO:0016343   obsolete unclassified cardiomyopathy

It has no ancestors, so it is not reachable from MONDO:0000001, so it cannot satisfy the DiseaseTerm dynamic enum in src/dismech/schema/dismech.yaml. Binding it as a disease_term fails just validate-terms outright.

The repository already encodes this rule

Three existing mechanisms independently reject an obsolete term, which is worth saying because it means this decision is not a new policy:

  • src/dismech/stubs/seed.py skips any nomination whose label starts with obsolete — "Nothing downstream should ever ask a curator to model one."
  • src/dismech/stubs/model.py reports such a stub as obsolete_term ("stale, tidy up"), and just tidy-stubs --apply deletes it.
  • docs/mondo-prioritizer.md uses this exact term as its worked example of a candidate dropped as obsolete.

StubEntryTypeEnum.OUT_OF_SCOPE in src/dismech/schema/curation_stub.yaml names "an obsolete concept" explicitly, so the vocabulary for this outcome already exists.

That is also why there is no tombstone stub. A stub for a retired MONDO term is exactly what tidy-stubs is built to sweep, so it would not survive as a record. docs/curation-notes/ is the durable home for the decision.

Nothing is lost by declining it

The historical bucket's contents are already curated individually. Checked with dismech.compare.mondo_priority.iter_covered_mondo_ids over kb/:

Concept MONDO Entry
dilated cardiomyopathy MONDO:0005021 Dilated_Cardiomyopathy.yaml
hypertrophic cardiomyopathy MONDO:0005045 Hypertrophic_Cardiomyopathy.yaml
restrictive cardiomyopathy MONDO:0005201 Restrictive_Cardiomyopathy.yaml
arrhythmogenic RV cardiomyopathy MONDO:0016587 Arrhythmogenic_Right_Ventricular_Cardiomyopathy.yaml
left ventricular noncompaction MONDO:0018901 Left_Ventricular_Noncompaction.yaml
Tako-tsubo cardiomyopathy MONDO:0019018 Takotsubo_Cardiomyopathy.yaml

The last two are the ESC 2008 "unclassified cardiomyopathies" category itself, so the concept's actual clinical content is covered by name. kb/disorders/ holds 50 files whose name contains "cardiomyopathy" (45 beyond the five listed above that carry the word; Left_Ventricular_Noncompaction does not), and alongside them sit two groupings (Familial_Dilated_Cardiomyopathy, Familial_Hypertrophic_Cardiomyopathy) and the cardiomyopathy_maladaptive_remodeling module.

Open gaps this surfaced

Two, both flagged rather than decided.

The classification this note leans on has since moved on

The ESC 2008 categories used above are what MONDO:0016343 was built on, but the 2023 ESC cardiomyopathy guideline (PMID:37622657) retired the "unclassified" category outright and put non-dilated left ventricular cardiomyopathy (NDLVC) in its place. So the bucket this note declines is not merely obsolete in MONDO — it is obsolete in the clinical nosology too, which strengthens the decision rather than complicating it.

NDLVC itself has no kb/ entry and no stub. It appears in kb/ only inside two other entries' evidence, never as an entity in its own right:

  • Hypertrophic_Cardiomyopathy_20.yaml — the abbreviated cohort label "DCM/NDLVC" in snippets, explanations and notes, and nothing else.
  • Dilated_Cardiomyopathy_1FF.yaml — the same abbreviated label, plus the only place the name is spelled out in full: five reference_title occurrences of Prediction and Prognostic Role of Left Ventricular Systolic Dysfunction in Family Screening for Dilated Cardiomyopathy and Non-Dilated Left Ventricular Cardiomyopathy.

The blocker is upstream, though, and it needs saying before anyone files a stub: MONDO has no NDLVC term. Searching l~non-dilated returns nothing, and l~left ventricular cardiomyopathy returns only MONDO:7770163 (arrhythmogenic left ventricular cardiomyopathy, dog). A stub requires a mondo_id matching ^MONDO:[0-9]{7}$, and a disease_term requires a term reachable from MONDO:0000001, so neither is available today. Curating NDLVC means requesting a MONDO term first.

The root the obsoletion points at is uncovered

MONDO:0004994 (cardiomyopathy) — the term MONDO tells you to consider instead — is not covered by any kb/ entry. It is referenced only in the prose description of kb/modules/cardiomyopathy_maladaptive_remodeling.yaml.

This is a separate question and is deliberately not settled here. Whether the cardiomyopathy root deserves a Grouping (a curated union over the five morphofunctional entries, in the shape of the two existing familial groupings) or nothing at all is a lump/split call that should be argued on its own merits, not carried in on the back of an obsoleted term. Flagging it, not deciding it.

Deep research

Not run. The question this request turns on is whether the concept can be a dismech entry, and MONDO answers that directly: the term is deprecated, detached from the hierarchy, and retired as out of scope. A literature report on cardiomyopathy cannot make a retired grouping term curatable, and the disease content it would return is already in the entries listed above.