Predicting the acute neurotoxicity of diverse organic solvents using probabilistic neural networks based QSTR modeling approaches

Abstract

Organic solvents are widely used chemicals and the neurotoxic properties of some are well established. In this study, we established nonlinear qualitative and quantitative structure-toxicity relationship (STR) models for predicting neurotoxic classes and neurotoxicity of structurally diverse solvents in rodent test species following OECD guideline principles for model development. Probabilistic neural network (PNN) based qualitative and generalized regression neural network (GRNN) based quantitative STR models were constructed using neurotoxicity data from rat and mouse studies. Further, interspecies correlation based quantitative activity–activity relationship (QAAR) and global QSTR models were also developed using the combined data set of both rodent species for predicting the neurotoxicity of solvents. The constructed models were validated through deriving several statistical coefficients for the test data and the prediction and generalization abilities of these models were evaluated. The qualitative STR models (rat and mouse) yielded classification accuracies of 92.86% in the test data sets, whereas, the quantitative STRs yielded correlation (R2) of >0.93 between the measured and model predicted toxicity values in both the test data (rat and mouse). The prediction accuracies of the QAAR (R2 0.859) and global STR (R2 0.945) models were comparable to those of the independent local STR models. The results suggest the ability of the developed QSTR models to reliably predict binary neurotoxicity classes and the endpoint neurotoxicities of the structurally diverse organic solvents.