A Summary of Product Characteristics (SPC) is a document describing the properties and the officially approved conditions of use of a medicine. It explains how to use and prescribe a medicine.

French SPC are available on the https://base-donnees-publique.medicaments.gouv.fr/ website in a HTML or PDF format when it comes from the European Medicines Agency.

In the context of medical informatics, natural language processing and information extraction research, it is useful to build a corpus about approved medicinal products. This repository contains the source code to build this corpus but not the corpus itself. If you are interested by the corpus go to the python directory.

• HTML_SPC_DOWNLOADED: French SCP in HTML format (1 example file)
• PDF_SPC_DOWNLOADED: European SCP in PDF format (from the European Medicines Agency) (1 example file)
• SPC_europe_txt: output folder of European SCP in PDF format after txt extraction (1 example file)
• CIS_europe_link.tsv: mappings between the CIS code and the european SPC code
• python: a script example to load the corpus
• java: Java programs (see below)

They are three Java programs:

• Transform PDF files to txt files
• Extract the content of SPC in txt format
• Extract the content of SPC in HTML format

mvn clean package ./java

To extract SPC sections from HTML files:

java -jar java/rcphtml/target/htmlrcp2json.jar HTML_SPC_DOWNLOADED/ ./html_spc.json

To convert PDF files to TXT files:

java -jar java/extractpdf/target/PDFExtractorSPC.jar PDF_SPC_DOWNLOADED/ ./SPC_europe_txt/

To extract SPC sections from TXT files:

java -jar java/rcppdf/target/pdfrcp2json.jar SPC_europe_txt/ ./pdf_spc.json

These two json files made up the French SPC corpus and are compressed with the following commands:

tar -zcf html_spc.tar.gz html_spc.json
tar -zcf pdf_spc.tar.gz pdf_spc.json

This repository is part of the DRUGS-SAFER research program, funded by the French Medicines Agency (Agence Nationale de Sécurité du Médicament et des Produits de Santé, ANSM). This work represents the views of the authors and does not necessarily represent the opinion of the French Medicines Agency.