Computer Scientist Sorts Out Confusable Drug Names

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Computer Scientist Sorts Out Confusable Drug Names

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=38827

Was that Xanex or Xanax? Or maybe Zantac? If you're a health care

professional you'd better know the difference--mistakes can be fatal.

An estimated 1.3 million people in the United States alone are

injured each year from medication errors, and the U.S. Federal Drug

Administration (FDA) has been working to reduce the possibilities of

these errors, such as a documented case in which a patient needed an

injection of Narcan but received Norcuron and went into cardiac

arrest.

A few years ago, the FDA turned to Project Performance Corporation

(PPC), a U.S. software company, to ensure they don't approve the

names of new drugs that may easily be confused with any one of the

more than 4,400 drugs that have already been approved.

PPC looked at the problem and then, based on a tip from a professor

at the University of land, turned to Dr. Greg Kondrak, a

professor in the University of Alberta Department of Computing

Science.

" During my PhD research, I wrote a program called ALINE for

identifying similar-sounding words in the world's languages. The

program incorporates techniques developed in linguistics and

bioinformatics, " Kondrak said. " At the time some people criticized it

because they felt it wouldn't ever have a practical application. "

PPC analyzed Kondrak's program and felt it might help with their

project. Kondrak gave them ALINE and then created a new program for

them, BI SIM, which analyzes and compares the spelling of words.

PPC combined Kondrak's programs into a system that the FDA has been

using for the past two years to analyze proposed drug names and rank

them in terms of confusability, both phonetically and

orthographically, with existing drugs.

" The FDA used to have dozens of people scouring the lists of names to

check if the proposed ones were too similar to any of them, and this

wasn't a good use of resources, and it wasn't always effective--

people make mistakes, " Kondrak said. " But now one person using PPC's

system can identify sound-alike and look-alike drug names with great

accuracy in a matter of seconds, " he added. Drug companies covet

finding good, short drug names that are easy to remember, Kondrak

noted, adding, " the FDA and other drug agencies need to balance this

against confusing the names with existing ones--it's a serious

problem. "

Kondrak co-authored a paper on this topic that was recently published

in the journal Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. Earlier, he gave

a presentation to Health Canada officials, who are interested in

following the FDA's lead in addressing the problem of confusing drug

names.

A number of linguists and computer scientists are also now using

Kondrak's ALINE for various purposes, and he is pleased his software,

once criticized as being useless, is much in demand, though he does

not charge anyone to use it.

" If anyone asks for it, I just give it to them, " Kondrak said. " I was

a funded researcher, and I look at it as my responsibility to share

what I've learned and what I've done. "

" When you do basic research sometimes you don't know how it might

become of use, but if this software helps to reduce even just 10 per

cent of prescription errors in the U.S. that translates into helping

a lot of people, and it's very satisfying to contribute to that. "