Dataset Information

Enhancing timeliness of drug overdose mortality surveillance: A machine learning approach.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:Timely data is key to effective public health responses to epidemics. Drug overdose deaths are identified in surveillance systems through ICD-10 codes present on death certificates. ICD-10 coding takes time, but free-text information is available on death certificates prior to ICD-10 coding. The objective of this study was to develop a machine learning method to classify free-text death certificates as drug overdoses to provide faster drug overdose mortality surveillance. METHODS:Using 2017-2018 Kentucky death certificate data, free-text fields were tokenized and features were created from these tokens using natural language processing (NLP). Word, bigram, and trigram features were created as well as features indicating the part-of-speech of each word. These features were then used to train machine learning classifiers on 2017 data. The resulting models were tested on 2018 Kentucky data and compared to a simple rule-based classification approach. Documented code for this method is available for reuse and extensions: https://github.com/pjward5656/dcnlp. RESULTS:The top scoring machine learning model achieved 0.96 positive predictive value (PPV) and 0.98 sensitivity for an F-score of 0.97 in identification of fatal drug overdoses on test data. This machine learning model achieved significantly higher performance for sensitivity (p<0.001) than the rule-based approach. Additional feature engineering may improve the model's prediction. This model can be deployed on death certificates as soon as the free-text is available, eliminating the time needed to code the death certificates. CONCLUSION:Machine learning using natural language processing is a relatively new approach in the context of surveillance of health conditions. This method presents an accessible application of machine learning that improves the timeliness of drug overdose mortality surveillance. As such, it can be employed to inform public health responses to the drug overdose epidemic in near-real time as opposed to several weeks following events.

SUBMITTER: Ward PJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6795484 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Enhancing timeliness of drug overdose mortality surveillance: A machine learning approach.

Ward Patrick J PJ Rock Peter J PJ Slavova Svetla S Young April M AM Bunn Terry L TL Kavuluru Ramakanth R

PloS one 20191016 10

<h4>Background</h4>Timely data is key to effective public health responses to epidemics. Drug overdose deaths are identified in surveillance systems through ICD-10 codes present on death certificates. ICD-10 coding takes time, but free-text information is available on death certificates prior to ICD-10 coding. The objective of this study was to develop a machine learning method to classify free-text death certificates as drug overdoses to provide faster drug overdose mortality surveillance.<h4>M ...[more]

PMID: 31618226

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Project description:BackgroundDrug repositioning, also known as drug repurposing, defines new indications for existing drugs and can be used as an alternative to drug development. In recent years, the accumulation of large volumes of information related to drugs and diseases has led to the development of various computational approaches for drug repositioning. Although herbal medicines have had a great impact on current drug discovery, there are still a large number of herbal compounds that have no definite indications.ResultsIn the present study, we constructed a computational model to predict the unknown pharmacological effects of herbal compounds using machine learning techniques. Based on the assumption that similar diseases can be treated with similar drugs, we used four categories of drug-drug similarity (e.g., chemical structure, side-effects, gene ontology, and targets) and three categories of disease-disease similarity (e.g., phenotypes, human phenotype ontology, and gene ontology). Then, associations between drug and disease were predicted using the employed similarity features. The prediction models were constructed using classification algorithms, including logistic regression, random forest and support vector machine algorithms. Upon cross-validation, the random forest approach showed the best performance (AUC = 0.948) and also performed well in an external validation assessment using an unseen independent dataset (AUC = 0.828). Finally, the constructed model was applied to predict potential indications for existing drugs and herbal compounds. As a result, new indications for 20 existing drugs and 31 herbal compounds were predicted and validated using clinical trial data.ConclusionsThe predicted results were validated manually confirming the performance and underlying mechanisms - for example, irinotecan as a treatment for neuroblastoma. From the prediction, herbal compounds were considered to be drug candidates for related diseases which is important to be further developed. The proposed prediction model can contribute to drug discovery by suggesting drug candidates from herbal compounds which have potentials but few were studied.

Dataset Information

Enhancing timeliness of drug overdose mortality surveillance: A machine learning approach.

Publications

Enhancing timeliness of drug overdose mortality surveillance: A machine learning approach.

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