CADEminer: A System for Mining Consumer Reports on Adverse Drug Side Effects

We introduce CADEminer, a system that mines consumer reviews on medications in order to facilitate discovery of drug side effects that may not have been identified in clinical trials. CADEminer utilises search and natural language processing techniques to (a) extract mentions of side effects, and other relevant concepts such as drug names and diseases in reviews; (b) normalise the extracted mentions to their unified representation in ontologies such as SNOMED CT and MedDRA; (c) identify relationships between extracted concepts, such as a drug caused a side effect; (d) search in authoritative lists of known drug side effects to identify whether or not the extracted side effects are new and therefore require further investigation; and finally (e) provide statistics and visualisation of the data.