FAA Office of Aerospace Medicine
Civil Aerospace Medical Institute

Report No: DOT/FAA/AM-21/23

Title and Subtitle: Drug Name Correction of Medication Records from Aeromedical Certification Exams

Report Date: June 2021

Authors: Ding H, Copeland K, Greenhaw R, Mills B, Hileman C, Kieu V

Abstract: Misspelled drug names have been introduced in Federal Aviation Administration medication records from aeromedical certification exams because of typographical errors and from transcriptions of hand-written medical prescriptions. The correction of misspelled drug names contributes to aviation safety by improving the accuracy of the records and database quality needed for aeromedical research and operational queries. This report describes development of an automatic spell correction system to correct misspelled drug names.

This study compares candidate algorithms using linguistic and context metrics as well as reference dictionaries. A selection confidence index is introduced to rank the fuzzy matching results. The best correction rates are over 96% for the validation data set and approximately 93% for the much larger data set of records. To further improve the correction, more effort might be made in correcting cases in which one correct drug name or English word is misused as another drug name, refining the reference dictionary, interpreting abbreviations and strings with multiple words squeezed together, and using machine learning algorithms.

Key Words: Spelling Correction, Fuzzy Matching, Drug Name Correction, Aeromedical Certification Exam, Medication Record

No. of Pages: 18