Identifying Drug-to-Drug Interactions in Medical Content and Applying Interactions to Treatment Recommendations

A computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having a computer readable program stored therein, wherein the computer readable program, when executed on a computing device, causes the computing device to:

• perform natural language processing of natural language documents in a corpus of natural language documents, to identify content in the natural language documents that describe a drug-to-drug interaction;
• categorize the drug-to-drug interaction into a category of drug interaction based on at least one of severity type of the drug-to-drug interaction, medical concepts involved in the drug-to-drug interaction, or possible conditions that may occur due to the drug-to-drug interaction, as determined from features extracted from the identified content by the natural language processing;
• calculate, for a first drug in the drug-to-drug interaction, an exclusion weighting factor for use in evaluating treatments for patients that include a second drug of the drug-to-drug interaction based on the categorization of the drug-to-drug interaction;
• store the drug-to-drug interaction as a drug-to-drug interaction data structure in a drug-to-drug interaction data storage, wherein the drug-to-drug interaction data structure specifies the first drug, the second drug, the categorization of the drug-to-drug interaction, and the exclusion weighting factor associated with the drug-to-drug interaction;
• and
• generate a treatment recommendation for treating a medical condition of a patient based on one or more drug-to-drug interaction data structures stored in the drug-to-drug interaction data storage.

An apparatus comprising:

• at least one processor;
• and
• at least one memory coupled to the at least one processor, wherein the at least one memory comprises instructions which, when executed by the at least one processor, cause the at least one processor to:
• perform natural language processing of natural language documents in a corpus of natural language documents, to identify content in the natural language documents that describe a drug-to-drug interaction;
• categorize the drug-to-drug interaction into a category of drug interaction based on at least one of severity type of the drug-to-drug interaction, medical concepts involved in the drug-to-drug interaction, or possible conditions that may occur due to the drug-to-drug interaction, as determined from features extracted from the identified content by the natural language processing;
• calculate, for a first drug in the drug-to-drug interaction, an exclusion weighting factor for use in evaluating treatments for patients that include a second drug of the drug-to-drug interaction based on the categorization of the drug-to-drug interaction;
• store the drug-to-drug interaction as a drug-to-drug interaction data structure in a drug-to-drug interaction data storage, wherein the drug-to-drug interaction data structure specifies the first drug, the second drug, the categorization of the drug-to-drug interaction, and the exclusion weighting factor associated with the drug-to-drug interaction;
• and
• generate a treatment recommendation for treating a medical condition of a patient based on one or more drug-to-drug interaction data structures stored in the drug-to-drug interaction data storage.