Structured representation of the pharmacodynamics section of the summary of product characteristics for antibiotics: application for automated extraction and visualization of their antimicrobial activity spectra.

摘要

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to construct automatically a knowledge base concerning the pharmacodynamic properties of antibiotics and a visualization tool. DESIGN: The authors studied the various guidelines used to write the pharmacodynamics section of the Summary of Product Characteristics (SPC) for antibiotics and constructed a conceptual model of the information. Particular words, syntagms, and punctuation elements were marked in the SPC texts, and automatic extraction was then used to build a knowledge base. This base was used to create dynamic HTML tables displaying the activity spectra of the antibiotics. MEASUREMENTS: The authors analyzed the performances of automatic extraction (recall and precision). RESULTS: The conceptual pharmacodynamics model dealt with antibiotics, pathogens, susceptibility tests, and the prevalence of resistance. Automatic extraction had a recall rate of 97.9% and a precision of 96.2%. The tool displaying antibiotic spectra and resistance prevalences used color codes to identify differences in susceptibility. CONCLUSION: This tool can provide an overview of the prevalence of resistance as expressed in SPC in primary care settings. Its potential impact should be evaluated.