We have open-sourced a Python library called Drug Named Entity Recognition for finding drug names in a string. For example, “i bought some phenoxymethylpenicillin”. This NLP task is called named entity recognition (finding drug names in text) and named entity linking (mapping drugs to IDs).
Please note Drug Named Entity Recognition finds only high confidence drugs. It also doesn’t find short code names of drugs, such as abbreviations commonly used in medicine, such as “Ceph” for “Cephradin” - as these are highly ambiguous.
We have a no-code solution where you can use the library directly from Google Sheets!
You can install the plugin in Google Sheets here.
Drug Named Entity Recognition also only finds the English names of these drugs. Names in the other languages are not supported.
You can install the Python library by typing in the command line:
pip install drug-named-entity-recognition
The source code is on Github and the project is on Pypi.
If your NER problem is common across industries and likely to have been seen before, there may be an off-the-shelf NER tool for your purposes, such as our Country Named Entity Recognition Python library. Dictionary-based named entity recognition is not always the solution, as sometimes the total set of entities is an open set and can’t be listed (e.g. personal names), so sometimes a bespoke trained NER model is the answer. For tasks like finding email addresses or phone numbers, regular expressions (simple rules) are sufficient for the job.
If your named entity recognition or named entity linking problem is very niche and unusual, and a product exists for that problem, that product is likely to only solve your problem 80% of the way, and you will have more work trying to fix the final mile than if you had done the whole thing manually. Please contact Fast Data Science and we’ll be glad to discuss. For example, we’ve worked on a consultancy engagement to find molecule names in papers, and match author names to customers where the goal was to trace molecule samples ordered from a pharma company and identify when the samples resulted in a publication. For this case, there was no off-the-shelf library that we could use.
For a problem like identifying country names in English, which is a closed set with well-known variants and aliases, and an off-the-shelf library is usually available.
For identifying a set of molecules manufactured by a particular company, this is the kind of task more suited to a consulting engagement.
In your Python console, you can try the following:
from drug_named_entity_recognition import find_drugs
find_drugs("i bought some Phenoxymethylpenicillin".split(" "))
outputs a list of tuples.
[({'name': 'Phenoxymethylpenicillin',
'synonyms': {'Penicillin', 'Phenoxymethylpenicillin'},
'nhs_url': 'https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/phenoxymethylpenicillin',
'drugbank_id': 'DB00417'},
3,
3)]
You can ignore case with:
find_drugs("i bought some phenoxymethylpenicillin".split(" "),
is_ignore_case=True)
The Drug Named Entity Recognition library is independent of other NLP tools and has no dependencies. You don’t need any advanced system requirements and the tool is lightweight. However, it combines well with other libraries such as spaCy or the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK).
Here is an example call to the tool with a spaCy Doc object:
from drug_named_entity_recognition import find_drugs
import spacy
nlp = spacy.blank("en")
doc = nlp("i routinely rx rimonabant and pts prefer it")
find_drugs([t.text for t in doc], is_ignore_case=True)
outputs:
[({'name': 'Rimonabant', 'synonyms': {'Acomplia', 'Rimonabant', 'Zimulti'}, 'mesh_id': 'D063387', 'drugbank_id': 'DB06155'}, 3, 3)]
You can also use the tool together with the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK):
from drug_named_entity_recognition import find_drugs
from nltk.tokenize import wordpunct_tokenize
tokens = wordpunct_tokenize("i routinely rx rimonabant and pts prefer it")
find_drugs(tokens, is_ignore_case=True)
The main data source is from Drugbank, augmented by datasets from the NHS, MeSH, Medline Plus and Wikipedia.
If you want to update the dictionary, you can use the data dump from Drugbank and replace the file drugbank vocabulary.csv:
Download the open data dump from https://go.drugbank.com/releases/latest#open-data
If you want to update the Wikipedia dictionary, download the dump from Wikimedia and run
python extract_drug_names_and_synonyms_from_wikipedia_dump.py
If you want to update the dictionary, run
and run
python download_mesh_dump_and_extract_drug_names_and_synonyms.py
If the link doesn’t work, download the open data dump manually from https://www.nlm.nih.gov/. It should be called something like desc2023.xml. And comment out the Wget/Curl commands in the code.
To the extent possible under law, the person who associated CC0 with the DrugBank Open Data has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to the DrugBank Open Data. This work is published from: Canada.
If you find a problem, you are welcome either to raise an issue at https://github.com/fastdatascience/drug_named_entity_recognition/issues
The tool was developed:
MIT License. Copyright (c) 2023 Fast Data Science
Wood, T.A., Drug Named Entity Recognition [Computer software], Version 1.0.3, accessed at https://fastdatascience.com/drug-named-entity-recognition-python-library, Fast Data Science Ltd (2024)
@unpublished{drugnamedentityrecognition,
AUTHOR = {Wood, T.A.},
TITLE = {Drug Named Entity Recognition (Computer software), Version 1.0.3},
YEAR = {2024},
Note = {To appear},
url = {https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10970631},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.10970631}
}
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