TIRPnet: Risk prediction of traditional Chinese medicine ingredients based on a deep neural network

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has a history of over 3000 years of medical practice. Due to the complex ingredients and unclear pharmacological mechanism of TCM, it is very difficult to predict its risks. With the increase in the number and severity of spontaneous reports of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) of TCM, its safety has received widespread attention. In this study, we proposed a framework based on deep learning to predict the probability of adverse reactions caused by TCM ingredients and validated the model using real-world data. The spontaneous reporting data from Jiangsu Province of China was selected as the research data, which included 72,561 ADR reports of TCMs. All the ingredients of these TCMs were collected from the medical website and correlated with the corresponding ADRs. Then, a risk prediction model was constructed based on a deep neural network (DNN), named TIRPnet. Based on one-hot encoded data, our model achieved the optimal performance by fine-tuning some hyperparameters. The ten most commonly used TCM ingredients and their ADRs were collected as the test set to evaluate their performance as objective criteria. TIRPnet was constructed as a 7-layer DNN. The experimental results showed that TIRPnet performs excellently in all indicators, with a sensitivity of 0.950, specificity of 0.995, accuracy of 0.994, precision of 0.708, and F1 of 0.811. The proposed TIRPnet owns the ability to predict the ADRs of a single TCM ingredient by learning a large number of TCM-related spontaneous reports, which can help doctors design safe prescriptions and provide technical support for the pharmacovigilance of TCM.