Improving Prediction of Chronic Hepatitis B Treatment Response Using Molecular Embedding

Jihyeon Song, Soon Sun Kim, Ji Eun Han, Hyo Jung Cho, Jae Youn Cheong, Charmgil Hong

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2024.51.7.627

Chronic hepatitis B patients with no timely treatment are at a high risk of developing complications such as liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer). As a result, various antiviral agents for hepatitis B have been developed, and due to the different components of these antiviral agents, there can be variations in treatment responses among patients. Therefore, selecting the appropriate medication that leads to a favorable treatment response is considered crucial. In this study, in addition to the patient's blood test results and electronic medical records indicating drug prescriptions, information about components of the hepatitis B antiviral agents was incorporated for learning. The aim was to enhance the prediction performance of treatment responses one year after chronic hepatitis B patients' treatment. Molecular embedding of the antiviral agents included both fixed molecular embedding and those generated through an end-to-end structure utilizing a graph neural network model. By comparing with the baseline model, drug molecule embedding was confirmed to contribute to improving performance.