Building an ontology of adverse drug reactions for automated signal generation in pharmacovigilance

Automated signal generation in pharmacovigilance implements unsupervised statistical machine learning techniques in order to discover unknown adverse drug reactions (ADR) in spontaneous reporting systems. The impact of the terminology used for coding ADRs has not been addressed previously. The Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA) used worldwide in pharmacovigilance cases does not provide formal definitions of terms. We have built an ontology of ADRs to describe semantics of MedDRA terms. Ontological subsumption and approximate matching inferences allow a better grouping of medically related conditions. Signal generation performances are significantly improved but time consumption related to modelization remains very important.