Sepsis is a leading cause of mortality in intensive care units and costs hospitals billions annually. Treating a septic patient is highly challenging, because individual patients respond very differently to medical interventions and there is no universally agreed-upon treatment for sepsis. In this work, we propose an approach to deduce treatment policies for septic patients by using continuous state-space models and deep reinforcement learning. Our model learns clinically interpretable treatment policies, similar in important aspects to the treatment policies of physicians. The learned policies could be used to aid intensive care clinicians in medical decision making and improve the likelihood of patient survival.
@article{arxiv.1711.09602,
title = {Deep Reinforcement Learning for Sepsis Treatment},
author = {Aniruddh Raghu and Matthieu Komorowski and Imran Ahmed and Leo Celi and Peter Szolovits and Marzyeh Ghassemi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.09602},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
Extensions on earlier work (arXiv:1705.08422). Accepted at workshop on Machine Learning For Health at the conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2017