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Title: Continuous-Time Decision Transformer for Healthcare Applications
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for training intelligent medical agents to learn treatment policies and assist decision making in many healthcare applications, such as scheduling clinical visits and assigning dosages for patients with chronic conditions. In this paper, we investigate the potential usefulness of Decision Transformer (Chen et al., 2021)–a new offline RL paradign– in medical domains where decision making in continuous time is desired. As Decision Transformer only handles discrete-time (or turn-based) sequential decision making scenarios, we generalize it to Continuous-Time Decision Transformer that not only considers the past clinical measurements and treatments but also the timings of previous visits, and learns to suggest the timings of future visits as well as the treatment plan at each visit. Extensive experiments on synthetic datasets and simulators motivated by real-world medical applications demonstrate that Continuous-Time Decision Transformer is able to outperform competitors and has clinical utility in terms of improving patients’ health and prolonging their survival by learning high-performance policies from logged data generated using policies of different levels of quality.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1940107 1918854
NSF-PAR ID:
10425826
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of The 26th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics
Volume:
206
Page Range / eLocation ID:
6245-6262
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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  1. Abstract

    Using medical images to evaluate disease severity and change over time is a routine and important task in clinical decision making. Grading systems are often used, but are unreliable as domain experts disagree on disease severity category thresholds. These discrete categories also do not reflect the underlying continuous spectrum of disease severity. To address these issues, we developed a convolutional Siamese neural network approach to evaluate disease severity at single time points and change between longitudinal patient visits on a continuous spectrum. We demonstrate this in two medical imaging domains: retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) in retinal photographs and osteoarthritis in knee radiographs. Our patient cohorts consist of 4861 images from 870 patients in the Imaging and Informatics in Retinopathy of Prematurity (i-ROP) cohort study and 10,012 images from 3021 patients in the Multicenter Osteoarthritis Study (MOST), both of which feature longitudinal imaging data. Multiple expert clinician raters ranked 100 retinal images and 100 knee radiographs from excluded test sets for severity of ROP and osteoarthritis, respectively. The Siamese neural network output for each image in comparison to a pool of normal reference images correlates with disease severity rank (ρ = 0.87 for ROP andρ = 0.89 for osteoarthritis), both within and between the clinical grading categories. Thus, this output can represent the continuous spectrum of disease severity at any single time point. The difference in these outputs can be used to show change over time. Alternatively, paired images from the same patient at two time points can be directly compared using the Siamese neural network, resulting in an additional continuous measure of change between images. Importantly, our approach does not require manual localization of the pathology of interest and requires only a binary label for training (same versus different). The location of disease and site of change detected by the algorithm can be visualized using an occlusion sensitivity map-based approach. For a longitudinal binary change detection task, our Siamese neural networks achieve test set receiving operator characteristic area under the curves (AUCs) of up to 0.90 in evaluating ROP or knee osteoarthritis change, depending on the change detection strategy. The overall performance on this binary task is similar compared to a conventional convolutional deep-neural network trained for multi-class classification. Our results demonstrate that convolutional Siamese neural networks can be a powerful tool for evaluating the continuous spectrum of disease severity and change in medical imaging.

     
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  2. Obeid, Iyad Selesnick (Ed.)
    Electroencephalography (EEG) is a popular clinical monitoring tool used for diagnosing brain-related disorders such as epilepsy [1]. As monitoring EEGs in a critical-care setting is an expensive and tedious task, there is a great interest in developing real-time EEG monitoring tools to improve patient care quality and efficiency [2]. However, clinicians require automatic seizure detection tools that provide decisions with at least 75% sensitivity and less than 1 false alarm (FA) per 24 hours [3]. Some commercial tools recently claim to reach such performance levels, including the Olympic Brainz Monitor [4] and Persyst 14 [5]. In this abstract, we describe our efforts to transform a high-performance offline seizure detection system [3] into a low latency real-time or online seizure detection system. An overview of the system is shown in Figure 1. The main difference between an online versus offline system is that an online system should always be causal and has minimum latency which is often defined by domain experts. The offline system, shown in Figure 2, uses two phases of deep learning models with postprocessing [3]. The channel-based long short term memory (LSTM) model (Phase 1 or P1) processes linear frequency cepstral coefficients (LFCC) [6] features from each EEG channel separately. We use the hypotheses generated by the P1 model and create additional features that carry information about the detected events and their confidence. The P2 model uses these additional features and the LFCC features to learn the temporal and spatial aspects of the EEG signals using a hybrid convolutional neural network (CNN) and LSTM model. Finally, Phase 3 aggregates the results from both P1 and P2 before applying a final postprocessing step. The online system implements Phase 1 by taking advantage of the Linux piping mechanism, multithreading techniques, and multi-core processors. To convert Phase 1 into an online system, we divide the system into five major modules: signal preprocessor, feature extractor, event decoder, postprocessor, and visualizer. The system reads 0.1-second frames from each EEG channel and sends them to the feature extractor and the visualizer. The feature extractor generates LFCC features in real time from the streaming EEG signal. Next, the system computes seizure and background probabilities using a channel-based LSTM model and applies a postprocessor to aggregate the detected events across channels. The system then displays the EEG signal and the decisions simultaneously using a visualization module. The online system uses C++, Python, TensorFlow, and PyQtGraph in its implementation. The online system accepts streamed EEG data sampled at 250 Hz as input. The system begins processing the EEG signal by applying a TCP montage [8]. Depending on the type of the montage, the EEG signal can have either 22 or 20 channels. To enable the online operation, we send 0.1-second (25 samples) length frames from each channel of the streamed EEG signal to the feature extractor and the visualizer. Feature extraction is performed sequentially on each channel. The signal preprocessor writes the sample frames into two streams to facilitate these modules. In the first stream, the feature extractor receives the signals using stdin. In parallel, as a second stream, the visualizer shares a user-defined file with the signal preprocessor. This user-defined file holds raw signal information as a buffer for the visualizer. The signal preprocessor writes into the file while the visualizer reads from it. Reading and writing into the same file poses a challenge. The visualizer can start reading while the signal preprocessor is writing into it. To resolve this issue, we utilize a file locking mechanism in the signal preprocessor and visualizer. Each of the processes temporarily locks the file, performs its operation, releases the lock, and tries to obtain the lock after a waiting period. The file locking mechanism ensures that only one process can access the file by prohibiting other processes from reading or writing while one process is modifying the file [9]. The feature extractor uses circular buffers to save 0.3 seconds or 75 samples from each channel for extracting 0.2-second or 50-sample long center-aligned windows. The module generates 8 absolute LFCC features where the zeroth cepstral coefficient is replaced by a temporal domain energy term. For extracting the rest of the features, three pipelines are used. The differential energy feature is calculated in a 0.9-second absolute feature window with a frame size of 0.1 seconds. The difference between the maximum and minimum temporal energy terms is calculated in this range. Then, the first derivative or the delta features are calculated using another 0.9-second window. Finally, the second derivative or delta-delta features are calculated using a 0.3-second window [6]. The differential energy for the delta-delta features is not included. In total, we extract 26 features from the raw sample windows which add 1.1 seconds of delay to the system. We used the Temple University Hospital Seizure Database (TUSZ) v1.2.1 for developing the online system [10]. The statistics for this dataset are shown in Table 1. A channel-based LSTM model was trained using the features derived from the train set using the online feature extractor module. A window-based normalization technique was applied to those features. In the offline model, we scale features by normalizing using the maximum absolute value of a channel [11] before applying a sliding window approach. Since the online system has access to a limited amount of data, we normalize based on the observed window. The model uses the feature vectors with a frame size of 1 second and a window size of 7 seconds. We evaluated the model using the offline P1 postprocessor to determine the efficacy of the delayed features and the window-based normalization technique. As shown by the results of experiments 1 and 4 in Table 2, these changes give us a comparable performance to the offline model. The online event decoder module utilizes this trained model for computing probabilities for the seizure and background classes. These posteriors are then postprocessed to remove spurious detections. The online postprocessor receives and saves 8 seconds of class posteriors in a buffer for further processing. It applies multiple heuristic filters (e.g., probability threshold) to make an overall decision by combining events across the channels. These filters evaluate the average confidence, the duration of a seizure, and the channels where the seizures were observed. The postprocessor delivers the label and confidence to the visualizer. The visualizer starts to display the signal as soon as it gets access to the signal file, as shown in Figure 1 using the “Signal File” and “Visualizer” blocks. Once the visualizer receives the label and confidence for the latest epoch from the postprocessor, it overlays the decision and color codes that epoch. The visualizer uses red for seizure with the label SEIZ and green for the background class with the label BCKG. Once the streaming finishes, the system saves three files: a signal file in which the sample frames are saved in the order they were streamed, a time segmented event (TSE) file with the overall decisions and confidences, and a hypotheses (HYP) file that saves the label and confidence for each epoch. The user can plot the signal and decisions using the signal and HYP files with only the visualizer by enabling appropriate options. For comparing the performance of different stages of development, we used the test set of TUSZ v1.2.1 database. It contains 1015 EEG records of varying duration. The any-overlap performance [12] of the overall system shown in Figure 2 is 40.29% sensitivity with 5.77 FAs per 24 hours. For comparison, the previous state-of-the-art model developed on this database performed at 30.71% sensitivity with 6.77 FAs per 24 hours [3]. The individual performances of the deep learning phases are as follows: Phase 1’s (P1) performance is 39.46% sensitivity and 11.62 FAs per 24 hours, and Phase 2 detects seizures with 41.16% sensitivity and 11.69 FAs per 24 hours. We trained an LSTM model with the delayed features and the window-based normalization technique for developing the online system. Using the offline decoder and postprocessor, the model performed at 36.23% sensitivity with 9.52 FAs per 24 hours. The trained model was then evaluated with the online modules. The current performance of the overall online system is 45.80% sensitivity with 28.14 FAs per 24 hours. Table 2 summarizes the performances of these systems. The performance of the online system deviates from the offline P1 model because the online postprocessor fails to combine the events as the seizure probability fluctuates during an event. The modules in the online system add a total of 11.1 seconds of delay for processing each second of the data, as shown in Figure 3. In practice, we also count the time for loading the model and starting the visualizer block. When we consider these facts, the system consumes 15 seconds to display the first hypothesis. The system detects seizure onsets with an average latency of 15 seconds. Implementing an automatic seizure detection model in real time is not trivial. We used a variety of techniques such as the file locking mechanism, multithreading, circular buffers, real-time event decoding, and signal-decision plotting to realize the system. A video demonstrating the system is available at: https://www.isip.piconepress.com/projects/nsf_pfi_tt/resources/videos/realtime_eeg_analysis/v2.5.1/video_2.5.1.mp4. The final conference submission will include a more detailed analysis of the online performance of each module. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Research reported in this publication was most recently supported by the National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation award number IIP-1827565 and the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Universal Research Enhancement Program (PA CURE). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official views of any of these organizations. REFERENCES [1] A. Craik, Y. He, and J. L. Contreras-Vidal, “Deep learning for electroencephalogram (EEG) classification tasks: a review,” J. Neural Eng., vol. 16, no. 3, p. 031001, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1088/1741-2552/ab0ab5. [2] A. C. Bridi, T. Q. Louro, and R. C. L. Da Silva, “Clinical Alarms in intensive care: implications of alarm fatigue for the safety of patients,” Rev. Lat. Am. Enfermagem, vol. 22, no. 6, p. 1034, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1590/0104-1169.3488.2513. [3] M. Golmohammadi, V. Shah, I. Obeid, and J. Picone, “Deep Learning Approaches for Automatic Seizure Detection from Scalp Electroencephalograms,” in Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology: Emerging Trends in Research and Applications, 1st ed., I. Obeid, I. Selesnick, and J. Picone, Eds. New York, New York, USA: Springer, 2020, pp. 233–274. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36844-9_8. [4] “CFM Olympic Brainz Monitor.” [Online]. Available: https://newborncare.natus.com/products-services/newborn-care-products/newborn-brain-injury/cfm-olympic-brainz-monitor. [Accessed: 17-Jul-2020]. [5] M. L. Scheuer, S. B. Wilson, A. Antony, G. Ghearing, A. Urban, and A. I. Bagic, “Seizure Detection: Interreader Agreement and Detection Algorithm Assessments Using a Large Dataset,” J. Clin. Neurophysiol., 2020. https://doi.org/10.1097/WNP.0000000000000709. [6] A. Harati, M. Golmohammadi, S. Lopez, I. Obeid, and J. Picone, “Improved EEG Event Classification Using Differential Energy,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology Symposium, 2015, pp. 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1109/SPMB.2015.7405421. [7] V. Shah, C. Campbell, I. Obeid, and J. Picone, “Improved Spatio-Temporal Modeling in Automated Seizure Detection using Channel-Dependent Posteriors,” Neurocomputing, 2021. [8] W. Tatum, A. Husain, S. Benbadis, and P. Kaplan, Handbook of EEG Interpretation. New York City, New York, USA: Demos Medical Publishing, 2007. [9] D. P. Bovet and C. Marco, Understanding the Linux Kernel, 3rd ed. O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2005. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/understanding-the-linux/0596005652/. [10] V. Shah et al., “The Temple University Hospital Seizure Detection Corpus,” Front. Neuroinform., vol. 12, pp. 1–6, 2018. https://doi.org/10.3389/fninf.2018.00083. [11] F. Pedregosa et al., “Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python,” J. Mach. Learn. Res., vol. 12, pp. 2825–2830, 2011. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1953048.2078195. [12] J. Gotman, D. Flanagan, J. Zhang, and B. Rosenblatt, “Automatic seizure detection in the newborn: Methods and initial evaluation,” Electroencephalogr. Clin. Neurophysiol., vol. 103, no. 3, pp. 356–362, 1997. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0013-4694(97)00003-9. 
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  3. The offline reinforcement learning (RL) problem is often motivated by the need to learn data-driven decision policies in financial, legal and healthcare applications. However, the learned policy could retain sensitive information of individuals in the training data (e.g., treatment and outcome of patients), thus susceptible to various privacy risks. We design offline RL algorithms with differential privacy guarantees which provably prevent such risks. These algorithms also enjoy strong instance-dependent learning bounds under both tabular and linear Markov Decision Process (MDP) settings. Our theory and simulation suggest that the privacy guarantee comes at (almost) no drop in utility comparing to the non-private counterpart for a medium-size dataset. 
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  4. null (Ed.)
    Sum-product networks (SPN) are knowledge compilation models and are related to other graphical models for efficient probabilistic inference such as arithmetic circuits and AND/OR graphs. Recent investigations into generalizing SPNs have yielded sum-product-max networks (SPMN) which offer a data-driven alternative for decision making that has predominantly relied on handcrafted models. However, SPMNs are not suited for decision-theoretic planning which involves sequential decision making over multiple time steps. In this paper, we present recurrent SPMNs (RSPMN) that learn from and model decision-making data over time. RSPMNs utilize a template network that is unfolded as needed depending on the length of the data sequence. This is significant as RSPMNs not only inherit the benefits of SPNs in being data driven and mostly tractable, they are also well suited for planning problems. We establish soundness conditions on the template network, which guarantee that the resulting SPMN is valid, and present a structure learning algorithm to learn a sound template. RSPMNs learned on a testbed of data sets, some generated using RDDLSim, yield MEUs and policies that are close to the optimal on perfectly-observed domains and easily improve on a recent batch-constrained RL method, which is important because RSPMNs offer a new model-based approach to offline RL. 
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  5. Abstract

    Patient‐reported outcomes (PROs) play an increasingly important role in medical decision making. Yet, patients whose objectives differ from their physician's may strategically report symptoms to alter treatment decisions. For example, athletes may underreport symptoms to expedite return‐to‐play (RTP) from sports‐related concussion (SRC). Thus, clinicians must implement treatment policies that mitigate thePrice of Naïveté, that is, the reduction in health outcomes due to naïvely believing strategically reported symptoms. In this study, we analyze dynamic treatment cessation decisions with strategic patients. Specifically, we formulate the Behavior‐Aware Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (BA‐POMDP), which optimizes the timing of treatment cessation decisions while accounting for known symptom‐reporting behaviors. We then analytically characterize the BA‐POMDP's optimal policy, leading to several practical insights. Next, we formulate the Behavior‐Learning Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (BL‐POMDP), which extends the BA‐POMDP by learning a patient's symptom‐reporting behavior over time. We show that the BL‐POMDP is decomposable into several BA‐POMDPs, allowing us to leverage the BA‐POMDP's structural properties for solving the BL‐POMDP. Then, we apply the BL‐POMDP to RTP from SRC using data from 29 institutions across the United States. We estimate the Price of Naïveté by comparing the BL‐POMDP to naïve benchmark policies. Accordingly, the BL‐POMDP reduces premature RTP by over 44% and provides up to 3.63 additional health‐adjusted athletic exposures per athlete compared to current practice. Overall, changing the interpretation of reported symptoms can better reduce the Price of Naïveté over adjusting treatment cessation thresholds. Therefore, to improve patients' health outcomes, clinicians must understand how strategic behavior manifests in PROs.

     
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