Enhancing Drug Recommender System for Peptic Ulcer Treatment

Abstract

Drug Recommender Systems (DRS) streamline prescription process and contribute to better healthcare. Hence, this study developed a DRS that recommends appropriate drug(s) for the treatment of an ailment using Peptic Ulcer Disease (PUD) as a case study. Patients’ and drug data were elicited from MIMIC-IV and Drugs.com, respectively. These data were analysed and used in the design of the DRS model, which was based on the hybrid recommendation approach (combining the clustering algorithm, the Collaborative Filtering approach (CF), and the Knowledge-Based Filtering approach (KBF)). The factors that were considered in recommending appropriate drugs were age, gender, body weight, allergies, and drug interactions. The model designed was implemented in Python programming language with the Flask framework for web development and Visual Studio Code as the Integrated Development Environment. The performance of the system was evaluated using Precision, Recall, Accuracy, Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and usability test. The evaluation was carried out in two phases. Firstly, the CF component was evaluated by splitting the dataset from MIMIV-IV into a 70% (60,018) training set and a 30% (25,722) test set. This resulted in a precision score of 85.48%, a recall score of 85.58%, and a RMSE score of 0.74. Secondly, the KBF component was evaluated using 30 different cases. The evaluation for this was computed manually by comparing the recommendation results from the system with those of an expert. This resulted in a precision of 77%, a recall of 83%, an accuracy of 81% and an RMSE of 0.24. The results from the usability test showed a high percentage of performance of the system. The addition of the KBF reduced the error rate between actual recommendations and predicted recommendations. So, the system had a high ability to recommend appropriate drug(s) for PUD.