Assessing the Impact of a New Released Medicine Towards Medication Strategy Using Graph Based Visualization

Clinical research has led to the development of new medications and medication strategy may change to gain better treatment outcomes. With the increasing attention to the evidence based medical guideline, it is important for clinicians to study the medication strategy changes. This study is interested in evaluating long-term prescriptions of type 2 diabetes patients provided by Kyoto University Hospital following the release of a new medication in 2010. Frequent sequential pattern mining (FSPM) is a prominent tools for extracting frequent patterns. However, the number of the result set could be enormous and may inhibit clinicians in assessing the results. To help the clinicians, a medication progression graph (MPG) is constructed using adjacent (1-sequence) frequent patterns produced by the singleton pattern mining. Compared to conventional frequent patterns, singleton’s patterns features full itemsets and 1-step distance. Hence, the pattern represents the true medication transition event. Using the graph, a clinical physician was able to observe a significant increase of physician’s activities in changing the medication after the release (i.e., in MPG that start with Sulfonylurea after 2010, the number of edges is increase by 2.83 and the number of nodes is increase by 2.27 compared to before 2010). Our preliminary results show that the new visualization method enables a clinician to analyze a medication strategy changes after the new medication released.