Abstractive Summarization of Drug Dosage Regimens for Supporting Drug Comparison

Complicated dosage regimens often reduce adherence to drug treatments. The ease-of-administration must thus be taken into account when prescribing. Given one drug, there exists often several dosage regimens. Hence, comparison to similar drugs is difficult. Simplifying and summarizing them appears to be a required task for supporting General Practitioners to find the drug with the simplest regimen for the patient. We propose a summarization in two steps: first prunes out all low-importance information, and second proceed to fusion of remaining information. Rules for pruning and fusion strategies were designed by an expert in drug models. Evaluation was conducted on a dataset of 169 drugs. The agreement rate was 27.2%. We demonstrate that applying rules leads to a result that is correct by a computational point of view, but the result is often meaningless for the GP. We conclude with recommendations for further work.