Estimating Dynamic Treatment Regimes in Mobile Health Using V-learning
This work addresses the challenge of personalized treatment planning in mobile health for patients with chronic conditions like diabetes, offering a novel method to handle real-time, continuous decision-making.
The authors tackled the problem of estimating optimal dynamic treatment regimes for mobile health applications, which require minute-by-minute decisions over indefinite time horizons, by proposing a new reinforcement learning method called V-learning. They applied the method to control blood glucose levels in type 1 diabetes patients, showing that the estimators are consistent and asymptotically normal under mild conditions.
The vision for precision medicine is to use individual patient characteristics to inform a personalized treatment plan that leads to the best healthcare possible for each patient. Mobile technologies have an important role to play in this vision as they offer a means to monitor a patient's health status in real-time and subsequently to deliver interventions if, when, and in the dose that they are needed. Dynamic treatment regimes formalize individualized treatment plans as sequences of decision rules, one per stage of clinical intervention, that map current patient information to a recommended treatment. However, existing methods for estimating optimal dynamic treatment regimes are designed for a small number of fixed decision points occurring on a coarse time-scale. We propose a new reinforcement learning method for estimating an optimal treatment regime that is applicable to data collected using mobile technologies in an outpatient setting. The proposed method accommodates an indefinite time horizon and minute-by-minute decision making that are common in mobile health applications. We show the proposed estimators are consistent and asymptotically normal under mild conditions. The proposed methods are applied to estimate an optimal dynamic treatment regime for controlling blood glucose levels in patients with type 1 diabetes.