Figure 1

A. Graphic reference frame of ICPCview. Each green cell corresponds to an ICPC-2 code. The upper part corresponds to general systems (social, skin, general, hematology, metabolic, musculoskeletal). The lower part, mimicking body anatomy, corresponds to systems: the head, on the top, contains in the top-down order: psychiatry, neurology, eye pathology, ear pathology; the trunk, under the head, contains in top-down order, the rectangles corresponding to the different systems successively: cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, urology, pregnancy, female and male genitals. The limb-like structures group the ICPC-2 codes respectively corresponding to localized pathologies of the musculoskeletal system. See Additional file 1. B. Enlarged version of the diagnoses and symptoms of the respiratory system Globally, there are two sets of rows: one set of four rows corresponding to "inflammatory and infectious diseases" and another set of one row, corresponding to tumors. However, some pathologies inside these sets are neither inflammatory-infectious nor tumors (for example "other respiratory trauma"). The ordinal criterion of arrangement of codes may be fuzzy: for example asthma, which is far from the medial line, has various manifestations, some severe or others not. It was placed here to be close to "Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease", which is above it. The pathologies outside the rectangle, which belong to the musculoskeletal system, have been removed.