Negative culture results in microbiologyevents

[masa25103]

Hello,

I believe negative culture results should be “null” in one of the columns, like org_name in microbiologyevents. https://mimic.mit.edu/docs/iv/modules/hosp/microbiologyevents/

In mySQL select count( distinct(subject_id)) from mimicIV.microbiologyevents where org_name is null;

This will return some results but the majority is 'BONE MARROW - CYTOGENETICS' under ‘spec_type_desc’. This is not microbiology culture, and other types of culture results such as blood culture have a very small number. My experience as a physician is that negative cultures should be more frequent than positive cultures. However, this is not the case in the current table. Please let me know if any other way to find negative culture results or if this is the issue of data extraction.

Thank you for your comments in advance. Best,