Extracting Information from Summary of Product Characteristics for Improving Drugs Prescription Safety

Information about medications is critical in supporting decision-making during the prescription process and thus in improving the safety and quality of care. The Summary of Product Characteristics (SPC) represents the basis of information for health professionals on how to use medicines. However, this information is locked in free-text and, as such, cannot be actively accessed and elaborated by computerized applications. In this work, we propose a machine learning based system for the automatic recognition of drug-related entities (active ingredient, interaction effects, etc.) in SPCs, focusing on drug interactions. Our approach learns to classify this information in a structured prediction framework, relying on conditional random fields. The classifier is trained and evaluated using a corpus of a hundred SPCs. They have been hand-annotated with thirteen semantic labels that have been derived from a previously developed domain ontology. Our evaluations show that the model exhibits high overall performance, with an average F

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-measure of about 90%.