FDA Phonetic and Orthographic Computer Analysis Program

[jcr]

http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/ResourcesForYou/Industry/ucm400127.htm

[treerex]

Here are two papers that describe the techniques used by the FDA system (or that were used in the mid-2000's) to find these confusable names.

"Automatic identification of confusable drug names" (2006, http://goo.gl/W5DK0f PDF)

and

"Identification of Confusable Drug Names: A New Approach and Evaluation Methodology" (2004, http://goo.gl/RziUgf PDF)

Both by Grzegorz Kondrak and Bonnie Dorr.

I've used the BI-SIM in a medical-informatics system and it does quite well. I'm also a big fan of EDITEX, which for some uses is better.

[jcr]

This submission was reposted by request. The POCA software was mentioned in the "How FDA Reviews Proposed Drug Names" PDF and is somewhat interesting reading:

http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/DrugSafety/MedicationErro...

The PDF was previously submitted by 'aclimatt' here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10079659