Advancing Multi-Organ Disease Care: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Framework

Multi-organ diseases present significant challenges due to their simultaneous impact on multiple organ systems, necessitating complex and adaptive treatment strategies. Despite recent advancements in AI-powered healthcare decision support systems, existing solutions are limited to individual organ systems. They often ignore the intricate dependencies between organ system and thereby fails to provide holistic treatment recommendations that are useful in practice. We propose a novel hierarchical multi-agent reinforcement learning (HMARL) framework to address these challenges. This framework uses dedicated agents for each organ system, and model dynamic through explicit inter-agent communication channels, enabling coordinated treatment strategies across organs. Furthermore, we introduce a dual-layer state representation technique to contextualize patient conditions at various hierarchical levels, enhancing the treatment accuracy and relevance. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations in managing sepsis (a complex multi-organ disease), our approach demonstrates its ability to learn effective treatment policies that significantly improve patient survival rates. This framework marks a substantial advancement in clinical decision support systems, pioneering a comprehensive approach for multi-organ treatment recommendations.

Medical Intervention Duration Estimation Using Language-enhanced Transformer Encoder with Medical Prompts

In recent years, estimating the duration of medical intervention based on electronic health records (EHRs) has gained significant attention in the filed of clinical decision support. However, current models largely focus on structured data, leaving out information from the unstructured clinical free-text data. To address this, we present a novel language-enhanced transformer-based framework, which projects all relevant clinical data modalities (continuous, categorical, binary, and free-text features) into a harmonized language latent space using a pre-trained sentence encoder with the help of medical prompts. The proposed method enables the integration of information from different modalities within the cell transformer encoder and leads to more accurate duration estimation for medical intervention. Our experimental results on both US-based (length of stay in ICU estimation) and Asian (surgical duration prediction) medical datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which outperforms tailored baseline approaches and exhibits robustness to data corruption in EHRs.