Critical Care | Full text | A novel approach for prediction of tacrolimus blood concentration in liver tranplantation patients in the ICU through support vector regressionThis is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Tacrolimus is an important immunosuppressive drug for organ transplantation patients. It has a narrow therapeutic range, toxic side effects, and a blood concentration with wide intra- and interindividual variability. Hence, it is of the utmost importance to monitor tacrolimus blood concentration, thereby ensuring clinical effect and avoiding toxic side effects. Prediction models for tacrolimus blood concentration can improve clinical care by optimizing monitoring of these concentrations, especially in the initial phase after transplantation during intensive care unit (ICU) stay. This is the first study in the ICU in which support vector machines, as a new data modeling technique, are investigated and tested in their prediction capabilities of tacrolimus blood concentration. Linear support vector regression (SVR) and nonlinear radial basis function (RBF) SVR are compared with multiple linear regression (MLR).This study received approval from the Ethics Committee of Ghent University Hospital. Fifty patients who had recently undergone liver transplantation in Ghent University Hospital were included, and their medical records were reviewed. Tacrolimus blood concentrations, together with 35 other clinically relevant variables, were extracted from the ICU database.
