A drug-adverse event extraction algorithm to support pharmacovigilance knowledge mining from PubMed citations
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Updated: May 26, 2026

Evidence-based Knowledge Synthesis and Hypothesis Validation: Navigating Biomedical Knowledge Bases via Explainable AI and Agentic Systems
Published on: June 13, 2025
Wei Wang1, Krystl Haerian, Hojjat Salmasian
1Dept of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
Abstract:
Adverse drug events (ADEs) create a serious problem causing substantial harm to patients. An executable standardized knowledgebase of drug-ADE relations which is publicly available would be valuable so that it could be used for ADE detection. The literature is an important source that could be used to generate a knowledgebase of drug-ADE pairs. In this paper, we report on a method that automatically determines whether a specific adverse event (AE) is caused by a specific drug based on the content of PubMed citations. A drug-ADE classification method was initially developed to detect neutropenia based on a pre-selected set of drugs. This method was then applied to a different set of 76 drugs to determine if they caused neutropenia. For further proof of concept this method was applied to 48 drugs to determine whether they caused another AE, myocardial infarction. Results showed that AUROC was 0.93 and 0.86 respectively.
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