A biosensing system employing nonlinear dynamic analysis-assisted neural network for drug-induced cardiotoxicity assessment

Preclinical investigation of drug-induced cardiotoxicity is of importance for drug development. To evaluate such cardiotoxicity, in vitro high-throughput interdigitated electrode-based recording of cardiomyocytes mechanical beating is widely used. To automatically analyze the features from the beating signals for drug-induced car- diotoxicity assessment, artificial neural network analysis is conventionally employed and signals are segmented into cycles and feature points are located in the cycles. However, signal segmentation and location of feature points for different signal shapes require design of specific algorithms. Consequently, this may lower the effi- ciency of research and the applications of such algorithms in signals with different morphologies are limited. Here, we present a biosensing system that employs nonlinear dynamic analysis-assisted neural network (NDANN) to avoid the signal segmentation process and directly extract features from beating signal time series. By pro- cessing beating time series with fixed time duration to avoid the signal segmentation process, this NDANN-based biosensing system can identify drug-induced cardiotoxicity with accuracy over 0.99. The individual drugs were classified with high accuracies over 0.94 and drug-induced cardiotoxicity levels were accurately predicted. We also evaluated the generalization performance of the NDANN-based biosensing system in assessing drug-induced cardiotoxicity through an independent dataset. This system achieved accuracy of 0.85-0.95 for different drug concentrations in identification of drug-induced cardiotoxicity. This result demonstrates that our NDANN-based biosensing system has the capacity of screening newly developed drugs, which is crucial in practical applications. This NDANN-based biosensing system can work as a new screening platform for drug-induced cardiotoxicity and improve the efficiency of bio-signal processing.