A Proposal of the Method to Identify Adverse Effects Based on Topic Maps

Abstract

Medical experts need to properly identify the adverse effects. However, this is difficult for novice medical experts, since such identification need veterans’ knowledge. One may consider reading of package inserts is helpful, since they are sole authorized documents. However, the novice medical experts will also feel difficulty, since the number of drugs is huge. In order to identify the adverse effect, patients’ explanation about what they feel are usually helpful. However, the problem is that there is an semantic gap between patients’ explanation and medical knowledge about adverse effects. The variations of patients’ explanation also make it complicated to extract information about adverse effects from their words. In this study, we utilize information in drug information sheets and techniques of topic maps. We propose the method to extract adverse effect information from drug information sheets, to associate it with patients’ explanation, and to create a database which has the topic map structure. We assume three elements to describe both patients’ symptom explanations and initial symptom descriptions in drug information sheets. Moreover, we propose the method that starts from the three elements and follows the associations to find adverse effects.

Keywords: Semantic Gap, Adverse Effects, Topic Maps

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe100524