title: Text mining for adverse drug events: the promise, challenges, and state of the art.
abstract: Text mining is the computational process of extracting meaningful information from large amounts of unstructured text. It is emerging as a tool to leverage underutilized data sources that can improve pharmacovigilance, including the objective of adverse drug event (ADE) detection and assessment. This article provides an overview of recent advances in pharmacovigilance driven by the application of text mining, and discusses several data sources-such as biomedical literature, clinical narratives, product labeling, social media, and Web search logs-that are amenable to text mining for pharmacovigilance. Given the state of the art, it appears text mining can be applied to extract useful ADE-related information from multiple textual sources. Nonetheless, further research is required to address remaining technical challenges associated with the text mining methodologies, and to conclusively determine the relative contribution of each textual source to improving pharmacovigilance.
authors.affiliation: Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, Stanford University, 1265 Welch Road, Stanford, CA, 94305-5479, USA, rharpaz@stanford.edu.
authors.forename: Rave
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Harpaz
authors.forename: Alison
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Callahan
authors.forename: Suzanne
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tamang
authors.forename: Yen
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Low
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Odgers
authors.forename: Sam
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Finlayson
authors.forename: Kenneth
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Jung
authors.forename: Paea
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: LePendu
authors.forename: Nigam H
authors.initials: NH
authors.lastname: Shah
mesh_terms: D003625:Data Collection; D057225:Data Mining / Q000379:methods*; D016208:Databases, Factual; D004348:Drug Labeling; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D060735:Pharmacovigilance; D061108:Social Media