Improvement of the clustering technique to classify medicines based on indications or efficacies

摘要

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.