An ANN model for treatment prediction in HBV patients

Two types of antiviral treatments, namely, interferon and nucleoside/nucleotide analogues are available for hepatitis infections. The selection of drug and dose determined using known pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics data is important. The lack of sufficient information for pharmacokinetics of a drug may not produce the desired results. Artificial neural network (ANN) provides a novel model-independent approach to pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics data. ANN model is created by supervised learning of 90 patients sample to predict the treatment strategy (lamivudine only and Lamivudine + Interferon) on the basis of viral load, liver function test, visit number, treatment duration, ethnic area, sex, and age. The model was trained with 68 (77.3%) samples and tested with 20 (22.7%) samples. The model produced 92% accuracy with 92.8% sensitivity and 83.3% specificity.