The Application of MATEC (Multi-AI Agent Team Care) Framework in Sepsis Care
This addresses sepsis care gaps in under-resourced hospitals, but it is an incremental application of existing AI methods to a new domain.
The researchers tackled the limited access to specialists in under-resourced hospitals for sepsis care by developing the MATEC framework, a team of AI agents, and found in a pilot study that physicians rated it as very useful (Median=4) and accurate (Median=4).
Under-resourced or rural hospitals have limited access to medical specialists and healthcare professionals, which can negatively impact patient outcomes in sepsis. To address this gap, we developed the MATEC (Multi-AI Agent Team Care) framework, which integrates a team of specialized AI agents for sepsis care. The sepsis AI agent team includes five doctor agents, four health professional agents, and a risk prediction model agent, with an additional 33 doctor agents available for consultations. Ten attending physicians at a teaching hospital evaluated this framework, spending approximately 40 minutes on the web-based MATEC application and participating in the 5-point Likert scale survey (rated from 1-unfavorable to 5-favorable). The physicians found the MATEC framework very useful (Median=4, P=0.01), and very accurate (Median=4, P<0.01). This pilot study demonstrates that a Multi-AI Agent Team Care framework (MATEC) can potentially be useful in assisting medical professionals, particularly in under-resourced hospital settings.