An AI-Empowered Home-Infrastructure to Minimize Medication Errors

Medication Extraction and Drug Interaction Chatbot: Generative Pretrained Transformer-Powered Chatbot for Drug-Drug Interaction

Objective

To assist individuals, particularly cancer patients or those with complex comorbidities, in quickly identifying potentially contraindicated medications when taking multiple drugs simultaneously.

Patients and Methods

In this study, we introduce the Medication Extraction and Drug Interaction Chatbot (MEDIC), an artificial intelligence system that integrates optical character recognition and Chat generative pretrained transformer through the Langchain framework. Medication Extraction and Drug Interaction Chatbot starts by receiving 2 drug bag images from the patient. It uses optical character recognition and text similarity techniques to extract drug names from the images. The extracted drug names are then processed through Chat generative pretrained transformer and Langchain to provide the user with information about drug contraindications. The MEDIC responds to the user with clear and concise sentences to ensure the information is easily understandable. This research was conducted from July 1, 2022 to April 30, 2024.

Results

This streamlined process enhances the accuracy of drug-drug interaction detection, providing a crucial tool for health care professionals and patients to improve medication safety. The proposed system was validated through rigorous evaluation using real-world data, reporting high accuracy in drug-drug interaction identification and highlighting its potential to benefit medication management practices considerably.

Conclusion

By implementing MEDIC, contraindicated medications can be identified using only medication packaging, and users can be alerted to potential drug adverse effects, thereby contributing to advancements in patient care in clinical settings.

Projection based inverse reinforcement learning for the analysis of dynamic treatment regimes

Dynamic Treatment Regimes (DTRs) are adaptive treatment strategies that allow clinicians to personalize dynamically the treatment for each patient based on their step-by-step response to their treatment. There are a series of predefined alternative treatments for each disease and any patient may associate with one of these treatments according to his/her demographics. DTRs for a certain disease are studied and evaluated by means of statistical approaches where patients are randomized at each step of the treatment and their responses are observed. Recently, the Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm has also been applied to determine DTRs. However, such approaches may be limited by the need to design a true reward function, which may be difficult to formalize when the expert knowledge is not well assessed, as when the DTR is in the design phase. To address this limitation, an extension of the RL paradigm, namely Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL), has been adopted to learn the reward function from data, such as those derived from DTR trials. In this paper, we define a Projection Based Inverse Reinforcement Learning (PB-IRL) approach to learn the true underlying reward function for given demonstrations (DTR trials). Such a reward function can be used both to evaluate the set of DTRs determined for a certain disease, as well as to enable an RL-based intelligent agent to self-learn the best way and then act as a decision support system for the clinician.