Adverse drug events (ADEs) are a significant global public health concern, and they have resulted in high rates of hospital admissions, morbidity, and mortality. Prior to the use of machine learning and deep learning methods, ADEs may not become well recognized until long after a drug has been approved and is widely used, which poses a significant challenge for ensuring patient safety. Consequently, there is a need to develop computational approaches for earlier identification of ADEs not detected during pre-registration clinical trials. This paper presents a state-of-the-art network-based approach that models patients as subgraphs composed of nodes of International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes and directed edges illustrating disease progression. Four Graph Neural Network (GNN) variants were employed to make sub-graph level predictions that answer three Research Questions (RQ): 1) whether ADE(s) would occur given a patient's prior diagnoses history, 2) when an ADE would occur, and 3) which ADE would occur. The first and second RQs were addressed using a binary classification approach. The third RQ was addressed using a multi-label classification model. The proposed network-based approach demonstrated superior performance in predicting ADEs, with the GraphSage model exhibiting the highest accuracy for both RQ 1 (0.8863) and RQ 3 (0.9367), while the Graph Attention Networks (GAT) model was found to perform best for RQ 2 (0.8769). Furthermore, an analysis segmented by ADE classification revealed that while RQs 1 and 3 exhibited minimal variance across different ADE categories, a distinct advantage was observed for categories B, C, and E in the context of RQ 2 when applying this sub-graph method. The network-based approach demonstrates the potential of GNNs in supporting the early detection and prevention of ADEs. Accurately predicting ADEs could enable healthcare professionals to make informed clinical decisions, take preventive measures and adjust medication regimens before serious adverse events occur. The proposed prediction method could also lead to optimized usage of healthcare resources by preventing hospital admissions and reducing the overall burden of adverse drug events on the healthcare systems.

The Delta variant of COVID-19 has been found to be extremely difficult to contain worldwide. The complex dynamics of human mobility and the variable intensity of local outbreaks make measuring the factors of COVID-19 transmission a challenge. The inter-suburb road connection details provide a reliable proxy of the moving options for people between suburbs for a given region. By using such data from Greater Sydney, Australia, this study explored the impact of suburban road networks on two COVID-19-related outcomes measures. The first measure is COVID-19 vulnerability, which gives a low score to a more vulnerable suburb. A suburb is more vulnerable if it has the first COVID-19 case earlier and vice versa. The second measure is COVID-19 severity, which is proportionate to the number of COVID-19-positive cases for a suburb. To analyze the suburban road network, we considered four centrality measures (degree, closeness, betweenness and eigenvector) and core–periphery structure. We found that the degree centrality measure of the suburban road network was a strong and statistically significant predictor for both COVID-19 vulnerability and severity. Closeness centrality and eigenvector centrality were also statistically significant predictors for COVID-19 vulnerability and severity, respectively. The findings of this study could provide practical insights to stakeholders and policymakers to develop timely strategies and policies to prevent and contain any highly infectious pandemics, including the Delta variant of COVID-19.

Recent years have witnessed booming data on drugs and their associated adverse drug reactions (ADRs). It was reported that these ADRs have resulted in a high hospitalisation rate worldwide. Therefore, a tremendous amount of research has been carried out to predict ADRs in the early phases of drug development, with the goal of reducing possible future risks. The pre-clinical and clinical phases of drug research can be time-consuming and cost-ineffective, so academics are looking forward to more extensive data mining and machine learning methods to be applied in this field of study. In this paper, we try to construct a drug-to-drug network based on non-clinical data sources. The network presents underlying relationships between drug pairs according to their common ADRs. Then, multiple node-level and graph-level network features are extracted from this network, e.g., weighted degree centrality, weighted PageRanks, etc. After concatenating the network features to the original drug features, they were fed into seven machine learning models, e.g., logistic regression, random forest, support vector machine, etc., and were compared to the baseline, where there were no network-based features considered. These experiments indicate that all the tested machine-learning methods would benefit from adding these network features. Among all these models, logistic regression (LR) had the highest mean AUROC score (82.1%) across all ADRs tested. Weighted degree centrality and weighted PageRanks were identified to be the most critical network features in the LR classifier. These pieces of evidence strongly indicate that the network approach can be vital in future ADR prediction, and this network-based approach could also be applied to other health informatics datasets.

The Omicron and Delta variants of COVID-19 have recently become the most dominant virus strains worldwide. A recent study on the Delta variant found that a suburban road network provides a reliable proxy for human mobility to explore COVID-19 severity. This study first examines the impact of road networks on COVID-19 severity for the Omicron variant using the infection and road connections data from Greater Sydney, Australia. We then compare the findings of this study with a recent study that used the infection data of the Delta variant for the same region. In analysing the road network, we used four centrality measures (degree, closeness, betweenness and eigenvector) and the coreness measure. We developed two multiple linear regression models for Delta and Omicron variants using the same set of independent and dependent variables. Only eigenvector is a statistically significant predictor for COVID-19 severity for the Omicron variant. On the other hand, both degree and eigenvector are statistically significant predictors for the Delta variant, as found in a recent study considered for comparison. We further found a statistical difference (p < 0.05) between the R-squared values for these two multiple linear regression models. Our findings point to an important difference in the transmission nature of Delta and Omicron variants, which could provide practical insights into understanding their infectious nature and developing appropriate control strategies accordingly.

Adverse drug events have been a significant concern in medication development as this issue has resulted in comparatively high risks of hospital admissions and death rates worldwide. Traditionally, these risks should have been identified through clinical trials, which could be time-consuming and cost-inefficient. At the same time, it still leaves some adverse drug events unknown due to limited samples in labs during the early phases of drug development. Therefore, various machine-learning techniques have been used in this field of study to support the discovery of adverse drug events as early as possible. This paper presents a state-of-the-art network-based approach to model each patient as a subgraph that consists of nodes of ICD-10 codes and directed edges showing the progression of their diseases. With the help of four Graph Neural Network variants, we could address three research questions 1) whether, 2) when, and 3) which ADEs would occur for a particular patient. In this short paper, we analysed the first question - how this method could be used in identifying cohorts associated with adverse drug events. The experiment showed that the GraphSage method employed on our suggested graph provided the highest accuracy - 0.8863 and the highest recall - 0.9128 for this research question. The same GNN-based framework could also be applied to the remaining research questions.

We aim to improve Drug-Drug Interactions (DDIs) by explicitly injecting medicinal-chemistry knowledge of functional groups (FGs) into graph neural network (GNN) message passing, in both transductive and inductive settings. Our goal is to (i) encode FG priors in a trainable way that enhances representation quality without handcrafting features, and (ii) yield interpretable attributions that align learned weights with pharmacologically meaningful FG patterns. We introduce FG-DDI, a dual-view GNN that augments both intra- and inter-molecular reasoning. At the intra-molecular level, atom/bond messages are scaled by FG enrichment weights derived from detected FG motifs within each drug graph. At the inter-molecular level, a bipartite message-passing layer between a drug pair is modulated by FG-FG enrichment scores that reflect empirical co-occurrence in known DDIs. Enrichment is computed as odds ratios from corpus statistics and injected via learnable gates, ensuring differentiability and allowing data to override noisy priors. We couple this with standard supervision on interaction labels and report accuracy (ACC), AUROC, average precision (AP), and F1. Experiments use DrugBank (1706 drugs; 86 interaction types) and TwoSides (filtered triplets) under transductive and inductive splits (one unseen; both unseen). We perform ablations removing each FG term to isolate contributions and assess stability across splits. Comprehensive experiments on DrugBank and TwoSides datasets demonstrate that FG-DDI achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. For DrugBank, the accuracy improves by 0.36% in transductive settings and by 0.46% and 1.42% in inductive settings, respectively for S1 and S2 partitioning. By systematically integrating chemical domain knowledge into deep learning architectures, this approach enables better generalization to unseen drug combinations while maintaining computational efficiency, making it particularly valuable for real-world pharmaceutical applications where new drugs continuously enter the market.