Machine learning-based prediction of sertraline concentration in patients with depression through therapeutic drug monitoring.

Sertraline is a commonly employed antidepressant in clinical practice. In order to control the plasma concentration of sertraline within the therapeutic window to achieve the best effect and avoid adverse reactions, a personalized model to predict sertraline concentration is necessary. This study aimed to establish a personalized medication model for patients with depression receiving sertraline based on machine learning to provide a reference for clinicians to formulate drug regimens. A total of 415 patients with 496 samples of sertraline concentration from December 2019 to July 2022 at the First Hospital of Hebei Medical University were collected as the dataset. Nine different algorithms, namely, XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost, random forest, GBDT, SVM, lasso regression, ANN, and TabNet, were used for modeling to compare the model abilities to predict sertraline concentration. XGBoost was chosen to establish the personalized medication model with the best performance ( = 0.63). Five important variables, namely, sertraline dose, alanine transaminase, aspartate transaminase, uric acid, and sex, were shown to be correlated with sertraline concentration. The model prediction accuracy of sertraline concentration in the therapeutic window was 62.5%. In conclusion, the personalized medication model of sertraline for patients with depression based on XGBoost had good predictive ability, which provides guidance for clinicians in proposing an optimal medication regimen.