Russian Scientists «Taught» Artificial Intelligence to Check Drug Compatibility

The system will start working next year

Russian scientists from the Moscow Aviation Institute have developed an artificial intelligence model that will help check drugs for compatibility.

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It is not uncommon for patients to take several different medications. However, they do not always go well with each other. According to medical research, taking up to 5 medications at the same time entails a risk to health from their incompatibility in about 5% of cases, with 6 or more, this probability increases to 25%. Thus, in every fourth case, this leads to some negative consequences for health.

Until now, the problem of drug compatibility has been solved by a doctor accessing data from a special medical database — the «State Register of Medicines». But studying numerous medical instructions takes a lot of time.

With the advent of artificial intelligence technology, the development of special programs began around the world that would help a doctor quickly resolve the issue of drug compatibility before prescribing them to a patient.

For example, in the West they are trying to teach AI to analyze the interactions between drug molecules .

According to the leading researcher at the Institute of Applied Mathematics named after. M.V. Keldysh RAS, professor of the Department of Computational Mathematics and Programming of the Moscow Aviation Institute Vladimir Sudakov, he and his colleagues took a different path. Their approach to training an artificial intelligence model is based not on the analysis of chemical processes, but on the analysis of texts and large language models.

With this approach, artificial intelligence, without knowing the intricacies of chemical processes, very well studies the entire corpus available to modern pharmacology medical texts, all kinds of instructions from different databases. Having “absorbed” hundreds of gigabytes of data, a supercomputer and a special program “remembers” the entire set of data and draws correct logical conclusions based on them.  

Test operation of the system showed that the model accurately indicates the correct result, but the most interesting thing is that it was able to establish a connection between drugs even where medical specialists had not previously seen it.

The system is currently undergoing test operation, and in 2025 it is planned to introduce it into the medical information system of one of the Russian clinics.