The similarity index of character shape of medicine names based on character shape similarity (II)

Abstract

The similarity of drug names in Japanese such as (Amaryl) and (Almarl) causes confusion over drug names and can lead to medical errors. In order to prevent such errors, methods of computing their similarity have been proposed. However, there are no studies that take account of character shape similarity quantitatively. In a previous study, we calculated the character shape similarity by template matching technique and proposed a method of measuring medicine name similarity based on it. Although we obtained a high correlation coefficient between the medicine name similarity values and subjective evaluation, we observed some character pairs that are not similar. In this study, we improved the method of computing the character shape similarity based on the characteristic points of character and compared it with advanced methods. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.