A Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient Approach to Medication Dosing and Surveillance in the ICU

By Rongmei Lin, Matthew D. Stanley, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Shamim Nemati. 2018

44 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Medication dosing in a critical care environment is a complex task that involves close monitoring of relevant physiologic and laboratory biomarkers and corresponding sequential adjustment of the prescribed dose. Misdosing of medications with narrow therapeutic windows (such as intravenous [IV] heparin) can result in preventable adverse events, decrease quality of care and increase cost. Therefore, a robust recommendation system can help clinicians by providing individualized dosing suggestions or corrections to existing protocols. We present a clinician-in-the-loop framework for adjusting IV heparin dose using deep reinforcement learning (RL). Our main objectives were to learn a new IV heparin dosing policy based on the multi-dimensional features of patients, and evaluate the effectiveness of the learned policy in the presence of other confounding factors that may contribute to heparin-related side effects. The data used in the experiments included 2598 intensive care patients from the publicly available MIMIC database and 2310 patients from the Emory University clinical data warehouse. Experimental results suggested that the distance from RL policy had a statistically significant association with anticoagulant complications $(p< 0.05)$, after adjusting for the effects of confounding factors.

Subfields: Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, Artificial Intelligence, Emergency Medical Services

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine

1. Shamim Nemati
2. Chao Yu
3. Jiming Liu

In Artificial Intelligence

1. Chao Yu
2. Jiming Liu
3. Shamim Nemati
4. Guoqi Ren

In Emergency Medical Services

1. Chao Yu
2. Jiming Liu
3. Shamim Nemati

Citations in the corpus

• Reinforcement Learning in Healthcare: A Survey (2019, methodology): “Lin et al. [129] applied DDPG in a continuous state-action space to learn a better policy for heparin dosing from observational data in MIMIC and the clinical data from the Emory University.”