Drug-drug Interaction Discovery Using Abstraction Networks for "National Drug File - Reference Terminology" Chemical Ingredients

The National Drug File - Reference Terminology (NDF-RT) is a large and complex drug terminology. NDF-RT provides important information about clinical drugs, e.g., their chemical ingredients, mechanisms of action, dosage form and physiological effects. Within NDF-RT such information is represented using tens of thousands of roles. It is difficult to comprehend large, complex terminologies like NDF-RT. In previous studies, we introduced abstraction networks to summarize the content and structure of terminologies. In this paper, we introduce the Ingredient Abstraction Network to summarize NDF-RT's Chemical Ingredients and their associated drugs. Additionally, we introduce the Aggregate Ingredient Abstraction Network, for controlling the granularity of summarization provided by the Ingredient Abstraction Network. The Ingredient Abstraction Network is used to support the discovery of new candidate drug-drug interactions (DDIs) not appearing in First Databank, Inc.'s DDI knowledgebase.