Rapid screening of chemicals for their potential to cause specific toxidromes

Abstract

Toxidromes constitute patterns of symptoms and signs caused by specific toxic effects that guide emergency treatments. Computational identification of chemicals that cause different toxidromes allows us to rapidly screen novel compounds and compound classes as to their potential toxicity. The aim of the current study was to create a computational toolset that can map chemicals to their potential toxidromes. Hence, we evaluated the performance of a state-of-the-art deep learning method—the recently developed communicative message passing neural network (CMPNN)—for its ability to overcome the use of small datasets for training deep learning models. Our results indicated that multi-task training—a technique known for its ability to use multiple small datasets to train conventional deep neural networks—works equally well with CMPNN. We also showed that CMPNN-based ensemble learning results in more reliable predictions than those obtained using a single CMPNN model. In addition, we showed that the standard deviations of individual model predictions from an ensemble of CMPNN models correlated with the errors of ensemble predictions and could be used to estimate the reliability of ensemble predictions. For toxidromes that do not have well-defined molecular mechanisms or sufficient data to train a deep learning model, we used the similarity ensemble approach to develop molecular structural similarity-based toxidrome models. We made the toolset developed in this study publicly accessible via a web user interface at https://toxidrome.bhsai.org/.