The Similarity Index of Medicine Names Based on Character Shape Similarity

Abstract

There are reports of medical errors mainly caused by the similarity of drug name. In order to prevent such errors, a search engine to find pairs of similar medicine names was developed. However, the system only evaluates sequences of common substrings and does not take account of character shape similarity. In this study, we propose a method to evaluate character similarity by image processing and apply the method to the medicine name similarity.