MedDRA® automated term groupings using OntoADR: evaluation with upper gastrointestinal bleedings

ABSTRACTObjective: To propose a method to build customized sets of MedDRA terms for the description of a medical condition. We illustrate this method with upper gastrointestinal bleedings (UGIB).Research design and methods: We created a broad list of MedDRA terms related to UGIB and defined a gold standard with the help of experts. MedDRA terms were formally described in a semantic resource named OntoADR. We report the use of two semantic queries that automatically select candidate terms for UGIB. Query 1 is a combination of two SNOMED CT concepts describing both morphology ‘Hemorrhage’ and finding site ‘Upper digestive tract structure’. Query 2 complements Query 1 by taking into account MedDRA terms associated to SNOMED CT concepts describing clinical manifestations ‘Melena’ or ‘Hematemesis’.Results: We compared terms in queries and our gold standard achieving a recall of 71.0% and a precision of 81.4% for query 1 (F1 score 0.76); and a recall of 96.7% and a precision of 77.0% for query 2 (F1 score 0.86)...