Expanding SNOMED-CT through Spanish Drug Summaries of Product Characteristics

Terminologies in the biomedical field are one of the main resources used in the clinical practice. Keeping them up-to-date to meet real-world use cases is a critical operation that even in the case of well maintained terminologies such as SNOMED-CT involves much effort from domain experts. Pharmacological products or drugs are constantly being approved and made available in the market and their clinical information should be also updated in terminologies. Each new drug is provided with its Summary of Product Characteristics (SPC), a document in natural language that contains its essential information. This paper proposes a method for populating the Spanish extension of SNOMED-CT with drug names using SPCs and representing their clinical data sections in the terminology. More precisely, the method has been applied to the therapeutic indication and the adverse reaction sections, in which disease names are recognized as named entities in the document and mapped to the terminology. The relations between the drug name and the mapped entities are also represented in the terminology based on the specific roles that they have in the document.