title: Grouping pharmacovigilance terms with semantic distance.
abstract: Pharmacovigilance is the activity related to the collection, analysis and prevention of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) induced by drugs or biologics. Besides other methods, statistical algorithms are used to detect previously unknown ADRs, and it was noted that groupings of ADR terms can further improve safety signal detection. Standardised MedDRA Queries are developed to assist retrieval and evaluation of MedDRA-coded ADR reports. Dependent on the context of their application, different SMQs show varying degrees of specificity and sensitivity; some appear to be over-inclusive, some might miss relevant terms. Moreover, several important safety topics are not yet fully covered by SMQs. The objective of this work is to propose an automatic method for the creation of groupings of terms. This method is based on the application of the semantic distance between MedDRA terms. Several experiments are performed, showing a promising precision and an acceptable recall.
authors: Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6, Paris F-75006, France.
authors: Marie
authors: M
authors: Dupuch
authors: Magnus
authors: M
authors: Lerch
authors: Anne
authors: A
authors: Jamet
authors: Marie-Christine
authors: MC
authors: Jaulent
authors: Reinhard
authors: R
authors: Fescharek
authors: Natalia
authors: N
authors: Grabar
mesh_terms: D016907:Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting Systems; D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D016208:Databases, Factual; D064420:Drug-Related Side Effects and Adverse Reactions; D001330:Electronic Data Processing; D006801:Humans; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012984:Software; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled