Clinical knowledge-guided deep reinforcement learning for sepsis antibiotic dosing recommendations

Sepsis is the third leading cause of death worldwide. Antibiotics are an important component in the treatment of sepsis. The use of antibiotics is currently facing the challenge of increasing antibiotic resistance (Evans et al., 2021). Sepsis medication prediction can be modeled as a Markov decision process, but existing methods fail to integrate with medical knowledge, making the decision process potentially deviate from medical common sense and leading to underperformance. (Wang et al., 2021). In this paper, we use Deep Q-Network (DQN) to construct a Sepsis Anti-infection DQN (SAI-DQN) model to address the challenge of determining the optimal combination and duration of antibiotics in sepsis treatment. By setting sepsis clinical knowledge as reward functions to guide DQN complying with medical guidelines, we formed personalized treatment recommendations for antibiotic combinations. The results showed that our model had a higher average value for decision-making than clinical decisions. For the test set of patients, our model predicts that 79.07% of patients will achieve a favorable prognosis with the recommended combination of antibiotics. By statistically analyzing decision trajectories and drug action selection, our model was able to provide reasonable medication recommendations that comply with clinical practices. Our model was able to improve patient outcomes by recommending appropriate antibiotic combinations in line with certain clinical knowledge.