Appropriate medication dosages in the intensive care unit (ICU) are critical for patient survival. Heparin, used to treat thrombosis and inhibit blood clotting in the ICU, requires careful administration due to its complexity and sensitivity to various factors, including patient clinical characteristics, underlying medical conditions, and potential drug interactions. Incorrect dosing can lead to severe complications such as strokes or excessive bleeding. To address these challenges, this study proposes a reinforcement learning (RL)-based personalized optimal heparin dosing policy that guides dosing decisions reliably within the therapeutic range based on individual patient conditions. A batch-constrained policy was implemented to minimize out-of-distribution errors in an offline RL environment and effectively integrate RL with existing clinician policies. The policy's effectiveness was evaluated using weighted importance sampling, an off-policy evaluation method, and the relationship between state representations and Q-values was explored using t-SNE. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted using the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III (MIMIC-III) database, demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed RL-based medication policy. Leveraging advanced machine learning techniques and extensive clinical data, this research enhances heparin administration practices and establishes a precedent for the development of sophisticated decision-support tools in medicine.

Learning template based information extraction from documents is a crucial yet difficult task. Prior template-based IE approaches assume foreknowledge of the domain templates; however, real-world IE do not have pre-defined schemas and it is a figure-out-as you go phenomena. To quickly bootstrap templates in a real-world setting, we need to induce template slots from documents with zero or minimal supervision. Since the purpose of question answering intersect with the goal of information extraction, we use automatic question generation to induce template slots from the documents and investigate how a tiny amount of a proxy human-supervision on-the-fly (termed as InteractiveIE) can further boost the performance. Extensive experiments on biomedical and legal documents, where obtaining training data is expensive, reveal encouraging trends of performance improvement using InteractiveIE over AI-only baseline.

A key challenge in sequential decision making is optimizing systems safely under partial information. While much of the literature has focused on the cases of either partially known states or partially known dynamics, it is further exacerbated in cases where both states and dynamics are partially known. Computing heparin doses for patients fits this paradigm since the concentration of heparin in the patient cannot be measured directly and the rates at which patients metabolize heparin vary greatly between individuals. While many proposed solutions are model free, they require complex models and have difficulty ensuring safety. However, if some of the structure of the dynamics is known, a model based approach can be leveraged to provide safe policies. In this paper we propose such a framework to address the challenge of optimizing personalized heparin doses. We use a predictive model parameterized individually by patient to predict future therapeutic effects. We then leverage this model using a scenario generation based approach that is capable of ensuring patient safety. We validate our models with numerical experiments by comparing the predictive capabilities of our model against existing machine learning techniques and demonstrating how our dosing algorithm can treat patients in a simulated ICU environment.

Estimation of individual treatment effects is often used as the basis for contextual decision making in fields such as healthcare, education, and economics. However, in many real-world applications it is sufficient for the decision maker to have upper and lower bounds on the potential outcomes of decision alternatives, allowing them to evaluate the trade-off between benefit and risk. With this in mind, we develop an algorithm for directly learning upper and lower bounds on the potential outcomes under treatment and non-treatment. Our theoretical analysis highlights a trade-off between the complexity of the learning task and the confidence with which the resulting bounds cover the true potential outcomes; the more confident we wish to be, the more complex the learning task is. We suggest a novel algorithm that maximizes a utility function while maintaining valid potential outcome bounds. We illustrate different properties of our algorithm, and highlight how it can be used to guide decision making using two semi-simulated datasets.