Dosage Prediction in Pediatric Medication Leveraging Prescription Big Data

Rational use of medicines is of great importance in pediatric clinical medication. As the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of the pediatric group is highly dynamic, it is a great challenge to determine the rational dosage for pediatric patients. Traditional clinical decision support systems for dosage guidance largely rely on manual collection of medication information, which usually suffers from incomplete and missing evidences for the pediatric group. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach to accurately predict pediatric medication dosages by leveraging prescription big data. More specifically, we first identify two relevant factors of pediatric medication dosage, i.e., the physiology factors including patients' body weight and age group, and the indication factors that affect clinical dosage patterns. We then extract the corresponding physiology and indication features, and propose a hybrid-learning-based method to adaptively integrate the two sets of heterogeneous features into a model for accurate pediatric dosage prediction. We evaluate our method on real-world prescription datasets from two tertiary children's hospitals. Results show that our method predicts pediatric medication dosages with an accuracy above 81.3%, and consistently outperforms other baselines.