Automatic identification and normalization of dosage forms in drug monographs

• Main Authors: Li Jiao, Lu Zhiyong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: BMC 2012-02-01
• Series: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
• Online Access: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6947/12/9

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Each day, millions of health consumers seek drug-related information on the Web. Despite some efforts in linking related resources, drug information is largely scattered in a wide variety of websites of different quality and credibility.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>As a step toward providing users with integrated access to multiple trustworthy drug resources, we aim to develop a method capable of identifying drug's dosage form information in addition to drug name recognition. We developed rules and patterns for identifying dosage forms from different sections of full-text drug monographs, and subsequently normalized them to standardized RxNorm dosage forms.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our method represents a significant improvement compared with a baseline lookup approach, achieving overall macro-averaged Precision of 80%, Recall of 98%, and F-Measure of 85%.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We successfully developed an automatic approach for drug dosage form identification, which is critical for building links between different drug-related resources.</p>