Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2008 Oct 27;8 Suppl 1(Suppl 1):S4.
doi: 10.1186/1472-6947-8-S1-S4.

A case report: using SNOMED CT for grouping Adverse Drug Reactions Terms

Iulian Alecu  1 , Cedric Bousquet, Marie-Christine Jaulent
Affiliations

A case report: using SNOMED CT for grouping Adverse Drug Reactions Terms

Iulian Alecu et al. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. .

Abstract

Background: WHO-ART and MedDRA are medical terminologies used for the coding of adverse drug reactions in pharmacovigilance databases. MedDRA proposes 13 Special Search Categories (SSC) grouping terms associated to specific medical conditions. For instance, the SSC "Haemorrhage" includes 346 MedDRA terms among which 55 are also WHO-ART terms. WHO-ART itself does not provide such groupings. Our main contention is the possibility of classifying WHO-ART terms in semantic categories by using knowledge extracted from SNOMED CT. A previous paper presents the way WHO-ART term definitions have been automatically generated in a description logics formalism by using their corresponding SNOMED CT synonyms. Based on synonymy and relative position of WHO-ART terms in SNOMED CT, specialization or generalization relationships could be inferred. This strategy is successful for grouping the WHO-ART terms present in most MedDRA SSCs. However the strategy failed when SSC were organized on other basis than taxonomy.

Methods: We propose a new method that improves the previous WHO-ART structure by integrating the associative relationships included in SNOMED CT.

Results: The new method improves the groupings. For example, none of the 55 WHO-ART terms in the Haemorrhage SSC were matched using the previous method. With the new method, we improve the groupings and obtain 87% coverage of the Haemorrhage SSC.

Conclusion: SNOMED CT's terminological structure can be used to perform automated groupings in WHO-ART. This work proves that groupings already present in the MedDRA SSCs (e.g. the haemorrhage SSC) may be retrieved using classification in SNOMED CT.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Discrimination of WHO-ART terms by SNOMED CT hierarchy using the synonymy relationship. The dark blue SNOMED CT concepts are both synonymous with the same WHO-ART term. A specialization link is introduced between the concepts A and B with regards to the a and b relative positions in the hierarchy.
Figure 2
Figure 2
An example of querying the model.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Brown EG. Effects of coding dictionary on signal generation: a consideration of use of MedDRA compared with WHO-ART. Drug Saf. 2002;25:445–52. doi: 10.2165/00002018-200225060-00009. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Yokotsuka M, Aoyama M, Kubota K. The use of a medical dictionary for regulatory activities terminology (MedDRA) in prescription-event monitoring in Japan (J-PEM) Int J Med Inform. 2000;57:139–53. doi: 10.1016/S1386-5056(00)00062-9. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Bousquet C, Lagier G, Lillo-Le Louet A, Le Beller C, Venot A, Jaulent MC. Appraisal of the MedDRA conceptual structure for describing and grouping adverse drug reactions - PubMed
    1. Alecu I, Bousquet C, Jaulent MC. Mapping of the WHO-ARTterminology on SNOMED CT to improve grouping of related adverse drug reactions. FCTC'2006 conference. Drug Saf. 2005;28:19–34. doi: 10.2165/00002018-200528010-00002. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Spackman KA, Campbell KE. Compositional conceptrepresentation using SNOMED: towards further convergence of clinical terminologies. Proc AMIA Symp. 1998:740–4. - PMC - PubMed

MeSH terms