Deep Attention Q-Network for Personalized Treatment Recommendation
This work addresses personalized treatment recommendations for patients in healthcare, offering an incremental improvement by enhancing state representation with attention mechanisms.
The paper tackled the problem of inaccurate patient state representation in personalized treatment recommendations by proposing a Deep Attention Q-Network that incorporates all past patient observations, demonstrating superiority over state-of-the-art models on real-world sepsis and acute hypotension cohorts.
Tailoring treatment for individual patients is crucial yet challenging in order to achieve optimal healthcare outcomes. Recent advances in reinforcement learning offer promising personalized treatment recommendations; however, they rely solely on current patient observations (vital signs, demographics) as the patient's state, which may not accurately represent the true health status of the patient. This limitation hampers policy learning and evaluation, ultimately limiting treatment effectiveness. In this study, we propose the Deep Attention Q-Network for personalized treatment recommendations, utilizing the Transformer architecture within a deep reinforcement learning framework to efficiently incorporate all past patient observations. We evaluated the model on real-world sepsis and acute hypotension cohorts, demonstrating its superiority to state-of-the-art models. The source code for our model is available at https://github.com/stevenmsm/RL-ICU-DAQN.