Extraction of potential adverse drug events from medical case reports

Abstract

The sheer amount of information about potential adverse drug events publishedin medical case reports pose major challenges for drug safety experts toperform timely monitoring. Efficient strategies for identification andextraction of information about potential adverse drug events fromfree‐text resources are needed to support pharmacovigilance researchand pharmaceutical decision making. Therefore, this work focusses on theadaptation of a machine learning‐based system for the identificationand extraction of potential adverse drug event relations from MEDLINE casereports. It relies on a high quality corpus that was manually annotatedusing an ontology‐driven methodology. Qualitative evaluation of thesystem showed robust results. An experiment with large scale relationextraction from MEDLINE delivered under‐identified potential adversedrug events not reported in drug monographs. Overall, this approach providesa scalable auto‐assistance platform for drug safety professionals toautomatically collect potential adverse drug events communicated asfree‐text data.