Sertraline in Psychiatric Practice : a Topographical Study

We propose an operational research contribution to clinical psychopharmacology ; the key problems of drug selection and outcome prediction are tackled in a retrospective study about Mood and Anxiety Disorders focusing on sertraline, a selective inhibitor of serotonin reuptake. A three-step approach to data coding, clinical modeling and rule extraction is proposed, based on topographical techniques (Kohonen's Self-Organizing Maps) and information theory (Shannon entropy and mutual information). Clinical data are bitwise sampled, allowing an unbiased definition of system metrics. Uncertainty measures are introduced for a real-world sized approach to clinical practice; top-down induction decision trees (TDIDT) for drug administration are proposed, and a default logic of prescription is analyzed in the light of direct clinical experience and available literature data.