Deep reinforcement learning-based propofol infusion control for anesthesia: A feasibility study with a 3000-subject dataset.

In this work, we present a deep reinforcement learning-based approach as a baseline system for autonomous propofol infusion control. Specifically, design an environment for simulating the possible conditions of a target patient based on input demographic data and design our reinforcement learning model-based system so that it effectively makes predictions on the proper level of propofol infusion to maintain stable anesthesia even under dynamic conditions that can affect the decision-making process, such as the manual control of remifentanil by anesthesiologists and the varying patient conditions under anesthesia. Through an extensive set of evaluations using patient data from 3000 subjects, we show that the proposed method results in stabilization in the anesthesia state, by managing the bispectral index (BIS) and effect-site concentration for a patient showing varying conditions.

Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Propofol Infusion Assistant Framework in Anesthesia.

This article aims to provide a hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL)-based solution to the automated drug infusion field. The learning policy is divided into the tasks of: 1) learning trajectory generative model and 2) planning policy model. The proposed deep infusion assistant policy gradient (DIAPG) model draws inspiration from adversarial autoencoders (AAEs) and learns latent representations of hypnotic depth trajectories. Given the trajectories drawn from the generative model, the planning policy infers a dose of propofol for stable sedation of a patient under total intravenous anesthesia (TIVA) using propofol and remifentanil. Through extensive evaluation, the DIAPG model can effectively stabilize bispectral index (BIS) and effect site concentration given a potentially time-varying target sequence. The proposed DIAPG shows an increased performance of 530% and 15% when a human expert and a standard reinforcement algorithm are used to infuse drugs, respectively.