AI & Health meetup: Medical guidelines, Reinforcement Learning and Explainable AI

AI for Health meetup - 12th October 2023

Time: 16:00 - 17:00, followed by drinks!

Location: NU Building - 3A06 

We are looking forward to seeing you at our next AI4Health meetup, with the following very interesting speakers:

Floris den Hengst (VU, Learning & Reasoning Group)

Guideline-informed reinforcement learning for mechanical ventilation in critical care

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has recently found many applications in the healthcare domain thanks to its natural fit to clinical decision-making and ability to learn optimal decisions from observational data. A key challenge in adopting RL-based solution in clinical practice, however, is the inclusion of existing knowledge in learning a suitable solution. Existing knowledge from e.g. medical guidelines may improve the safety of solutions, produce a better balance between short- and long-term outcomes for patients and increase trust and adoption by clinicians.

We present a framework for including knowledge available from medical guidelines in RL. The framework includes components for enforcing safety constraints and an approach that alters the learning signal to better balance short- and long-term outcomes based on these guidelines.

We evaluate the framework by extending an existing RL-based mechanical ventilation (MV) approach with clinically established ventilation guidelines. Results from off-policy policy evaluation indicate that our approach has the potential to decrease 90-day mortality while ensuring lung protective ventilation. This framework provides an important stepping stone towards implementations of RL in clinical practice and opens up several avenues for further research.

Bart de Vries (Amsterdam UMC, Internal Medicine) 

eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in Radiology and Nuclear Medicine
Bart will present an overview of his work on Explainable AI in healthcare, highlighting studies on applications in Radiology and Nuclear Medicine. 

Please RSVP here.

Dr Yvonne Blokland, Coordinator AI & Health Networks. Email