Exploring the Use of a Network Model in Drug Prescription Support for Dental Clinics

With more patients taking multiple medications and the increasing digital availability of diagnostic data such as treatment notes and x-ray images, the importance of decision support systems to help dentists in their treatment planning cannot be over emphasised. Based on the hypothesis that a higher similarity ratio between drugs in a drug-pair indicates that the combination of the drug-pair has a higher chance of an adverse interaction, this paper describes an efficient approach in extracting feature vectors from the drugs in a drug-pair to compute the similarity ratio between them. The feature vectors are obtained through a network model where the information of the drugs are represented as nodes and the relationships between them represented as edges. Experimental evaluation of our model yielded a superior F score of 74%. The use of a network model will drive research efforts into more efficient data-mining algorithms for information retrieval, similarity search and machine learning. Since it is important to avoid drug allergies when prescribing drugs, our work when integrated within the clinical work-flow will reduce prescription errors thereby increasing health outcomes for patients.