Annotations

Beta

This product or feature is subject to the "Pre-GA Offerings Terms" in the General Service Terms section of the Service Specific Terms. Pre-GA products and features are available "as is" and might have limited support. For more information, see the launch stage descriptions.

Annotation stores

An annotation store is a data store in the Cloud Healthcare API that holds annotation records. Annotation stores exist inside of datasets.

The AnnotationStore resource provides a representation of an annotation store's attributes. For each of your annotation stores, you can choose options like:

• Key-value pairs that you can use to organize your annotation stores. For more information, see Labeling resources.

Annotation records

In the Cloud Healthcare API, annotation records are labels that you can add to healthcare resources. For example, you might want to add labels for diagnostics to a FHIR patient resource, or add training labels when performing machine learning tasks.

You can create annotation records for FHIR and DICOM data. However, annotation stores and annotation records are kept separate from FHIR and DICOM stores and their underlying data. Annotation stores and annotation records also have their own permissions. This means that, if you make an annotation record for a FHIR resource (such as a Patient), you will need to combine the annotation record with the FHIR resource later, matching based on a criteria like the Patient ID, for the annotation record to take effect.

Separating annotation records from the data the annotation records reference lets you have multiple annotation record versions that can all apply to a single resource without impacting the original resource.