  Adverse drug reaction (ADR) is widely concerned for public health issue. ADRs
are one of most common causes to withdraw some drugs from market. Prescription
event monitoring (PEM) is an important approach to detect the adverse drug
reactions. The main problem to deal with this method is how to automatically
extract the medical events or side effects from high-throughput medical events,
which are collected from day to day clinical practice. In this study we propose
a novel concept of feature matrix to detect the ADRs. Feature matrix, which is
extracted from big medical data from The Health Improvement Network (THIN)
database, is created to characterize the medical events for the patients who
take drugs. Feature matrix builds the foundation for the irregular and big
medical data. Then feature selection methods are performed on feature matrix to
detect the significant features. Finally the ADRs can be located based on the
significant features. The experiments are carried out on three drugs:
Atorvastatin, Alendronate, and Metoclopramide. Major side effects for each drug
are detected and better performance is achieved compared to other computerized
methods. The detected ADRs are based on computerized methods, further
investigation is needed.
