Improvement of the Clustering Technique to Classify Medicines Based on Indications or Efficacies

A current Japanese standard for drug efficacy classification is comprised of words from both pharmaceutical and external fields. A previously reported method was based on clustering of descriptions in medical package inserts for circulatory drugs. In this report, a new criteria is proposed to extract clusters at each junction of a dendrogram relative to the number of drugs and the nouns in the drug description. Results of a comparative analysis indicate that the proposed method provides more detailed classification than the previous method.