A Drug Administration Decision Support System

Drug delivery is one of the most common clinical routines in hospitals, and is critical to patients´ health and recovery. It includes a decision making process in which a medical doctor decides the amount (dose) and frequency (dose interval) on the basis of a set of available patients´ feature data and the doctor´s clinical experience (a priori adaptation). This process can be computerized in order to make the prescription procedure in a fast, objective, inexpensive, non-invasive and accurate way. This paper proposes a Drug Administration Decision Support System (DADSS) to help clinicians/patients with the initial dose computing. The system is based on a Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm for estimation of the potential drug concentration in the blood of a patient, from which a best combination of dose and dose interval is selected at the level of a DSS. The addition of the RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) technique enhances the prediction accuracy by selecting inliers for SVM modeling. Experiments are performed for the drug imatinib case study which shows more than 40% improvement in the prediction accuracy compared with previous works. An important extension to the patient features´ data is also proposed in this paper.