Dosing of Warfarin in Iranian Adult Patients with An Artificial Heart Valve Using Artificial Neural Networks

  Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that has the ability of analyzing complex medical data. Using artificial intelligence is common in diagnosing, treating and taking care of patients. Warfarin is one of the most commonly prescribed oral anticoagulants. Determining the exact dose of warfarin needed for patients is one of the major challenges in the health system, which has attracted the attention of researchers. The purpose of this study was to determine the exact dose of warfarin needed for patients with artificial heart valves using artificial neural networks (ANN). A total of 9 multi-layer perceptron ANNs with different structures were constructed and evaluated based on a dataset including 846 patients who had referred to the PT clinic in Tehran Heart Center in the second half of the year 2013. Finally, the best structure of ANN for warfarin dose was investigated. All simulations including data preprocessing and neural network designing were done in MATLAB environment. The effectiveness of ANNs was evaluated in terms of classification performance using 10-fold cross-validation procedure and the results showed that the best model was a network that had 7 neurons in its hidden layer with an average absolute error of 0.1, turbulence rate of 0.33, and regression of 0.87. The achieved results reveal that ANNs are able to predict warfarin dose in Iranian patients with an artificial heart valve. Although no system can be guaranteed to achieve 100% accuracy, they can be effective in reducing medical errors.