Semantic Queries Expedite MedDRA Terms Selection Thanks to a Dedicated User Interface: A Pilot Study on Five Medical Conditions

Drug related adverse event assessment in neonates in clinical trials and clinical care

INTRODUCTION

Assessment of drug-related adverse events is essential to fully understand the benefit-risk balance of any drug exposure, weighing efficacy versus safety. This is needed for both drug labeling and clinical decision-making. Assessment is based on seriousness, severity and causality, be it more difficult to apply in neonates. Adverse event detection or prevention in the neonatal clinical setting is also more complicated because of polypharmacy, and off-label or unlicensed pharmacotherapy.

AREAS COVERED

Tools became available to assess severity and causality of adverse events in neonates recruited in clinical trials. The first version of the Neonatal Adverse Event severity score (NAESS) reduced the inter-observer variability. Causality tools like the Naranjo score were also tailored to neonates. These tools are also instrumental to support proactive pharmacovigilance in clinical care, while multidisciplinary care teams and computerized pharmacovigilance using advanced data analysis, like machine learning are emerging approaches to develop effective decision strategies.

EXPERT OPINION

All stakeholders involved in development of medicines or its clinical use should be aware of the limitations of the currently available assessment tools. Extension and optimization of these tools, advanced data analysis approaches, and capturing the variability in time-dependent physiology are warranted to improve pharmacovigilance in neonates.

The use of SNOMED CT, 2013-2020: a literature review

OBJECTIVE

This article reviews recent literature on the use of SNOMED CT as an extension of Lee et al's 2014 review on the same topic. The Lee et al's article covered literature published from 2001-2012, and the scope of this review was 2013-2020.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

In line with Lee et al's methods, we searched the PubMed and Embase databases and identified 1002 articles for review, including studies from January 2013 to September 2020. The retrieved articles were categorized and analyzed according to SNOMED CT focus categories (ie, indeterminate, theoretical, pre-development, implementation, and evaluation/commodity), usage categories (eg, illustrate terminology systems theory, prospective content coverage, used to classify or code in a study, retrieve or analyze patient data, etc.), medical domains, and countries.

RESULTS

After applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, 622 articles were selected for final review. Compared to the papers published between 2001 and 2012, papers published between 2013 and 2020 revealed an increase in more mature usage of SNOMED CT, and the number of papers classified in the "implementation" and "evaluation/commodity" focus categories expanded. When analyzed by decade, papers in the "pre-development," "implementation," and "evaluation/commodity" categories were much more numerous in 2011-2020 than in 2001-2010, increasing from 169 to 293, 30 to 138, and 3 to 65, respectively.

CONCLUSION

Published papers in more mature usage categories have substantially increased since 2012. From 2013 to present, SNOMED CT has been increasingly implemented in more practical settings. Future research should concentrate on addressing whether SNOMED CT influences improvement in patient care.

How to interact with medical terminologies? Formative usability evaluations comparing three approaches for supporting the use of MedDRA by pharmacovigilance specialists

BACKGROUND

Medical terminologies are commonly used in medicine. For instance, to answer a pharmacovigilance question, pharmacovigilance specialists (PVS) search in a pharmacovigilance database for reports in relation to a given drug. To do that, they first need to identify all MedDRA terms that might have been used to code an adverse reaction in the database, but terms may be numerous and difficult to select as they may belong to different parts of the hierarchy. In previous studies, three tools have been developed to help PVS identify and group all relevant MedDRA terms using three different approaches: forms, structured query-builder, and icons. Yet, a poor usability of the tools may increase PVS' workload and reduce their performance. This study aims to evaluate, compare and improve the three tools during two rounds of formative usability evaluation.

METHODS

First, a cognitive walkthrough was performed. Based on the design recommendations obtained from this evaluation, designers made modifications to their tools to improve usability. Once this re-engineering phase completed, six PVS took part in a usability test: difficulties, errors and verbalizations during their interaction with the three tools were collected. Their satisfaction was measured through the System Usability Scale. The design recommendations issued from the tests were used to adapt the tools.

RESULTS

All tools had usability problems related to the lack of guidance in the graphical user interface (e.g., unintuitive labels). In two tools, the use of the SNOMED CT to find MedDRA terms hampered their use because French PVS were not used to it. For the most obvious and common terms, the icons-based interface would appear to be more useful. For the less frequently used MedDRA terms or those distributed in different parts of the hierarchy, the structured query-builder would be preferable thanks to its great power and flexibility. The form-based tool seems to be a compromise.

CONCLUSION

These evaluations made it possible to identify the strengths of each tool but also their weaknesses to address them before further evaluation. Next step is to assess the acceptability of tools and the expressiveness of their results to help identify and group MedDRA terms.

Ontological and Non-Ontological Resources for Associating Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities Terms to SNOMED Clinical Terms With Semantic Properties

Background: Formal definitions allow selecting terms (e.g., identifying all terms related to “Infectious disease” using the query “has causative agent organism”) and terminological reasoning (e.g., “hepatitis B” is a “hepatitis” and is an “infectious disease”). However, the standard international terminology Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA) used for coding adverse drug reactions in pharmacovigilance databases does not beneficiate from such formal definitions. Our objective was to evaluate the potential of reuse of ontological and non-ontological resources for generating such definitions for MedDRA.

Methods: We developed several methods that collectively allow a semiautomatic semantic enrichment of MedDRA: 1) using MedDRA-to-SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) mappings (available in the Unified Medical Language System metathesaurus or other mapping resources, e.g., the MedDRA preferred term “hepatitis B” is associated to the SNOMED CT concept “type B viral hepatitis”) to extract term definitions (e.g., “hepatitis B” is associated with the following properties: has finding site liver structure, has associated morphology inflammation morphology, and has causative agent hepatitis B virus); 2) using MedDRA labels and lexical/syntactic methods for automatic decomposition of complex MedDRA terms (e.g., the MedDRA systems organ class “blood and lymphatic system disorders” is decomposed in blood system disorders and lymphatic system disorders) or automatic suggestions of properties (e.g., the string “cyclic” in preferred term “cyclic neutropenia” leads to the property has clinical course cyclic).

Results: The Unified Medical Language System metathesaurus was the main ontological resource reusable for generating formal definitions for MedDRA terms. The non-ontological resources (another mapping resource provided by Nadkarni and Darer in 2010 and MedDRA labels) allowed defining few additional preferred terms. While the Ci4SeR tool helped the curator to define 1,935 terms by suggesting potential supplemental relations based on the parents’ and siblings’ semantic definition, defining manually all MedDRA terms remains expensive in time.

Discussion: Several ontological and non-ontological resources are available for associating MedDRA terms to SNOMED CT concepts with semantic properties, but providing manual definitions is still necessary. The ontology of adverse events is a possible alternative but does not cover all MedDRA terms either. Perspectives are to implement more efficient techniques to find more logical relations between SNOMED CT and MedDRA in an automated way.