Learning signals of adverse drug-drug interactions from the unstructured text of electronic health records.

Drug-drug interactions (DDI) account for 30% of all adverse drug reactions, which are the fourth leading cause of death in the US. Current methods for post marketing surveillance primarily use spontaneous reporting systems for learning DDI signals and validate their signals using the structured portions of Electronic Health Records (EHRs). We demonstrate a fast, annotation-based approach, which uses standard odds ratios for identifying signals of DDIs from the textual portion of EHRs directly and which, to our knowledge, is the first effort of its kind. We developed a gold standard of 1,120 DDIs spanning 14 adverse events and 1,164 drugs. Our evaluations on this gold standard using millions of clinical notes from the Stanford Hospital confirm that identifying DDI signals from clinical text is feasible (AUROC=81.5%). We conclude that the text in EHRs contain valuable information for learning DDI signals and has enormous utility in drug surveillance and clinical decision support

Drug prescription support in dental clinics through drug corpus mining

The rapid increase in the volume and variety of data poses a challenge to safe drug prescription for the dentist. The increasing number of patients that take multiple drugs further exerts pressure on the dentist to make the right decision at point-of-care. Hence, a robust decision support system will enable dentists to make decisions on drug prescription quickly and accurately. Based on the assumption that similar drug pairs have a higher similarity ratio, this paper suggests an innovative approach to obtain the similarity ratio between the drug that the dentist is going to prescribe and the drug that the patient is currently taking. We conducted experiments to obtain the similarity ratios of both positive and negative drug pairs, by using feature vectors generated from term similarities and word embeddings of biomedical text corpus. This model can be easily adapted and implemented for use in a dental clinic to assist the dentist in deciding if a drug is suitable for prescription, taking into consideration the medical profile of the patients. Experimental evaluation of our model’s association of the similarity ratio between two drugs yielded a superior F score of 89%. Hence, such an approach, when integrated within the clinical work flow, will reduce prescription errors and thereby increase the health outcomes of patients

Provenance-Centered Dataset of Drug-Drug Interactions

Over the years several studies have demonstrated the ability to identify potential drug-drug interactions via data mining from the literature (MEDLINE), electronic health records, public databases (Drugbank), etc. While each one of these approaches is properly statistically validated, they do not take into consideration the overlap between them as one of their decision making variables. In this paper we present LInked Drug-Drug Interactions (LIDDI), a public nanopublication-based RDF dataset with trusty URIs that encompasses some of the most cited prediction methods and sources to provide researchers a resource for leveraging the work of others into their prediction methods. As one of the main issues to overcome the usage of external resources is their mappings between drug names and identifiers used, we also provide the set of mappings we curated to be able to compare the multiple sources we aggregate in our dataset.Comment: In Proceedings of the 14th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 201

Drug prescription support in dental clinics through drug corpus mining

The rapid increase in the volume and variety of data poses a challenge to safe drug prescription for the dentist. The increasing number of patients that take multiple drugs further exerts pressure on the dentist to make the right decision at point-of-care. Hence, a robust decision support system will enable dentists to make decisions on drug prescription quickly and accurately. Based on the assumption that similar drug pairs have a higher similarity ratio, this paper suggests an innovative approach to obtain the similarity ratio between the drug that the dentist is going to prescribe and the drug that the patient is currently taking. We conducted experiments to obtain the similarity ratios of both positive and negative drug pairs, by using feature vectors generated from term similarities and word embeddings of biomedical text corpus. This model can be easily adapted and implemented for use in a dental clinic to assist the dentist in deciding if a drug is suitable for prescription, taking into consideration the medical profile of the patients. Experimental evaluation of our model’s association of the similarity ratio between two drugs yielded a superior F score of 89%. Hence, such an approach, when integrated within the clinical work flow, will reduce prescription errors and thereby increase the health outcomes of patients