High Risk Route Calculation for Drug Interactions

Resolve Bottlenecks,
Find Innovative Solutions
Generate Solutions

Solution Overview

Problem

The complexity of drug interactions due to the increasing use of multiple medicines, herbal medicines, or health foods complicates the administration of treatments, making it difficult to trace and prevent adverse effects, especially as the number of medications increases, leading to a need for an efficient method to identify high-risk routes of administration.

Innovation Solution

A method that calculates a high-risk route of administration by listing arrangement routes of medicines, calculating risk scores using odds ratios, sorting, and combining routes to efficiently identify potential adverse interactions, while adjusting the number of routes searched until a preset number of patients matching the specified medication result is met.

Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles

VSEngineering Contradiction Analysis

1Reliability

If the route of administration includes more medicines to comprehensively analyze drug interactions, then the coverage of potential adverse effects improves, but the data amount and computational complexity increase non-linearly

Engineering Contradiction:
Improvecoverage of drug interaction analysisVSAvoidcomputational complexity
Core Design Contradiction:
ReliabilityVSDevice complexity

Solution Approach 1:

The patent segments the comprehensive drug interaction analysis into hierarchical levels: first identifying high-risk medicine pairs using odds ratios, then progressively combining them into multi-medicine routes. This segmentation transforms the non-linear complexity problem into manageable sequential steps, where each level builds upon the previous one rather than analyzing all combinations simultaneously.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #1Segmentation

Solution Approach 2:

The patent introduces a risk threshold parameter (odds ratio threshold) to filter and prioritize medicine combinations. By changing the parameter from analyzing all possible combinations to only those exceeding the threshold, the system maintains comprehensive coverage of significant interactions while reducing computational complexity by eliminating low-risk combinations from further analysis.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #35Parameter changes

2Measurement precision

If all possible medicine combinations are searched to ensure no high-risk route is missed, then the detection precision improves, but the time consumption increases significantly

Engineering Contradiction:
Improvedetection precision of high-risk routesVSAvoidsearch time
Core Design Contradiction:
Measurement precisionVSLoss of time

Solution Approach 1:

The patent performs preliminary action by pre-calculating odds ratios for all medicine pairs and sorting them by risk level before conducting the full route analysis. This preliminary sorting creates a prioritized list that guides the sequential combination process, ensuring that high-risk combinations are evaluated first while low-risk combinations can be truncated or skipped, thereby maintaining detection precision while reducing search time.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #10Preliminary action

Solution Approach 2:

The patent implements skipping by terminating the combination search early when a sufficient number of high-risk routes are identified or when the risk threshold is no longer met in sequential processing. This allows the system to rush through the analysis of high-priority combinations while skipping or truncating low-priority ones, achieving acceptable detection precision without exhaustive search.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #21Skipping (Rushing through)

3Reliability

If the odds ratio calculation includes more patient data to improve statistical accuracy, then the risk assessment reliability improves, but the data processing complexity increases

Engineering Contradiction:
Improverisk assessment reliabilityVSAvoiddata processing complexity
Core Design Contradiction:
ReliabilityVSDevice complexity

Solution Approach 1:

The patent extracts only the essential data elements needed for odds ratio calculation (exposure and outcome counts from medical records) while discarding unnecessary patient information. This extraction approach maintains statistical accuracy by preserving the core contingency table data while reducing overall data processing complexity by eliminating redundant patient-level details from the calculation process.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #2Taking out (Extraction)

Data Source

PatentEP4020496A1Method for calculating high risk route of administration
Publication Date: 2022.06.29 ACER INC
  • EP4020496A1 patent drawingFigure 1~2
  • EP4020496A1 patent drawingFigure 3~4
  • EP4020496A1 patent drawing

AI summary

A method for calculating a high risk route of administration is provided. Multiple arrangement routes composed of every two medicines among multiple medicines included in a medical record database (121) are listed (S205). A risk value of each arrangement route is calculated by querying the medical record database (121) based on a specified medication result (S210). A risk score of each arrangement route is calculated according to the risk value, and the arrangement routes are sorted based on the risk scores (S215). Starting from the arrangement route with the highest risk score, N arrangement routes are retrieved and a combination on N of the arrangement routes is performed to obtain multiple strung routes (S220). The number of medicines included in each strung route matches a specified medication number.