Abstract
BackgroundThe NDF-RT (National Drug File Reference Terminology) is an ontology, which describes drugs and their properties and supports computerized physician order entry systems. NDF-RT’s classes are mostly specified using only necessary conditions and lack sufficient conditions, making its use limited until recently, when asserted drug-class relations were added. The addition of these asserted drug-class relations presents an opportunity to compare them with drug-class relations that can be inferred using the properties of drugs and drug classes in NDF-RT.MethodsWe enriched NDF-RT’s drug-classes with sufficient conditions, added property equivalences, and then used an OWL reasoner to infer drug-class membership relations. We compared the inferred class relations to the recently added asserted relations derived from FDA Structured Product Labels.ResultsThe inferred and asserted relations only match in about 50% of the cases, due to incompleteness of the drug descriptions and quality issues in the class definitions.ConclusionsThis investigation quantifies and categorizes the disparities between asserted and inferred drug-class relations and illustrates issues with class definitions and drug descriptions. In addition, it serves as an example of the benefits DL can add to ontology development and evaluation.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13326-015-0007-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
We rely on ontologies throughout biomedicine, from the life sciences to the clinic [1]
We focus on the drug-property assertions from FDASPL, class-property assertions from FMTSME, and drug-class assertions provided by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
We developed a methodology to evaluate the content of National Drug File-Reference Terminology (NDF-RT) using description logics
Summary
We rely on ontologies throughout biomedicine, from the life sciences to the clinic [1]. Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems typically leverage drug ontologies to ensure that patients are safely prescribed drugs in accordance with clinical guidelines (e.g., [2]). An example of such an ontology is the National Drug File-Reference Terminology (NDF-RT), an extension to the drug formulary used by the Veterans Administration and developed using a description logics (DL) formalism. The April 2014 version of NDF-RT introduced a new set of relations between drugs and their properties originating from the class indexing file released as part of DailyMed, identified by the suffix “FDASPL” This version introduced authoritative drug-class membership assertions from the same source. We focus on the drug-property assertions from FDASPL, class-property assertions from FMTSME, and drug-class assertions provided by the FDA
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