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Article History

Received: 17 September 2018

Accepted: 24 July 2019

First Online: 20 August 2019

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: Not Applicable. To give you more description, first of all we have not used any of patients’ data. The data described in the Methods section are metadata, which is data about data including data ‘specifications’ and ‘definitions’. We have had no chance of using patients’ private and/or personal information at all in writing the manuscript. We believe that it is not necessary to take an IRB review for using metadata as long as we do not use any of patients’ data. Secondly, the authors themselves have developed and been in charge of operating the CHMR. Again CHMR is a metadata registry that does not contain any of patients’ real data but list of descriptions and definitions of common data elements (CDEs) conforming the ISO/IEC 11179 standard for metadata description and registry. According to the standard, metadata has such things as ‘the minimum value of patient’s age is set to be zero’, ‘the gender of a patient has a permissible value of ‘M’ for male, ‘F’ for female, etc. without having any of real ‘data’. The metadata used in this paper is freely available in the CHMR.

: Not Applicable.

: None of the authors has conflicts of interest with other persons or organizations that could inappropriately influence their work.