Tehran University Medical Journal

Background: Warfarin is one of the most common oral anticoagulant, which role is to prevent the clots. The dose of this medicine is very important because changes can be dangerous for patients. Diagnosis is difficult for physicians because increase and decrease in use of warfarin is so dangerous for patients. Identifying the clinical and genetic features involved in determining dose could be useful to predict using data mining techniques. The aim of this paper is to provide a convenient way to select the clinical and genetic features to determine the dose of warfarin using artificial neural networks (ANN) and evaluate it in order to predict the dose patients.

Methods: This experimental study, was investigate from April to May 2014 on 552 patients in Tehran Heart Center Hospital (THC) candidates for warfarin anticoagulant therapy within the international normalized ratio (INR) therapeutic target. Factors affecting the dose include clinical characteristics and genetic extracted, and different methods of feature selection based on genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization (PSO) and evaluation function neural networks in MATLAB (MathWorks, MA, USA), were performed.

Results: Between algorithms used, particle swarm optimization algorithm accuracy was more appropriate, for the mean square error (MSE), root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) were 0.0262, 0.1621 and 0.1164, respectively.

Conclusion: In this article, the most important characteristics were identified using methods of feature selection and the stable dose had been predicted based on artificial neural networks. The output is acceptable and with less features, it is possible to achieve the prediction warfarin dose accurately. Since the prescribed dose for the patients is important, the output of the obtained model can be used as a decision support system.