Section: New Results

Correlating Adverse Drug Side Effects

It is well known that many therapeutic drug molecules can have adverse side effects. However, when patients take several combinations of drugs it can be difficult to determine which drug is responsible for which side effect. In collaboration with Prof. Michel Dumontier of the Biomedical Informatics Research Laboratory, Stanford, we developed an approach which combines multiple ontologies such as the Anatomical Therapeutical Classification of Drugs, the ICD-9 classification of diseases, and the SNOMED-CT medical vocabulary together with the use of Pattern Structures (an extension of Formal Concept Analysis) in order to extract association rules to analyse the co-occurrence of adverse drug effects in patient records [26], [27]. A paper describing this work has been submitted to the Journal of Biomedical Semantics.