Supervised-actor-critic reinforcement learning for intelligent mechanical ventilation and sedative dosing in intensive care units

BACKGROUND: Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising technique to solve complex sequential decision making problems in healthcare domains. Recent years have seen a great progress of applying RL in addressing decision-making problems in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). However, since the goal of traditional RL algorithms is to maximize a long-term reward function, exploration in the learning process may have a fatal impact on the patient. As such, a short-term goal should also be considered to keep the patient stable during the treating process. METHODS: We use a Supervised-Actor-Critic (SAC) RL algorithm to address this problem by combining the long-term goal-oriented characteristics of RL with the short-term goal of supervised learning. We evaluate the differences between SAC and traditional Actor-Critic (AC) algorithms in addressing the decision making problems of ventilation and sedative dosing in ICUs. RESULTS: Results show that SAC is much more efficient than the traditional AC algorithm in terms of convergence rate and data utilization. CONCLUSIONS: The SAC algorithm not only aims to cure patients in the long term, but also reduces the degree of deviation from the strategy applied by clinical doctors and thus improves the therapeutic effect.