蓝莓视频

Imperial researchers have developed an Artificial Intelligence system that could be used to personalise the treatment of patients with sepsis in real time. The computational model, known as 鈥楢I Clinician鈥�, learned the best individual treatment strategy from medical records of almost 100,000 sepsis patients, and provided recommendations that proved more reliable than decisions made by human doctors.

Sepsis, or blood poisoning, is a severe complication of an infection that leads to life-threatening acute organ dysfunction, and kills ~44,000 every year in the UK. The condition is managed by giving intravenous fluids and in severe cases, vasopressors- a medication that causes tightening of blood vessels, thereby increasing blood pressure and maintaining blood flow. However there are no clear indicators of when vasopressors should be started, or how much fluid should be given, leading to extreme variability and sub-optimal treatment, resulting in poor patient outcomes.

To help doctors maximise a patient鈥檚 chance of survival, Imperial researchers 鈥榯rained鈥� an AI system to analyse individual patient鈥檚 vital signs and recommend the best treatment strategy. The results, published in , revealed that 98% of the time, the AI system matched, or was better than, the treatment decision made by a human doctor, with lowest mortality in patients where the human doctor鈥檚 doses of fluids and vasopressor matched the AI system鈥檚 suggestion. On the contrary, when the doctor鈥檚 decision differed from the AI system, a patient had a reduced chance of survival.

蓝莓视频 Research Professor , an Imperial BRC researcher and senior author of the study, explained further: 鈥淭he AI Clinician was able to 鈥榣earn鈥� from far more patients than any doctor could see in a lifetime. It has learnt from 100,000 patients and 鈥榬emembered鈥� them all equally whereas doctors are always susceptible to recall bias, where they particularly remember recent cases or unusual cases鈥�.

, senior author from the Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Computing at Imperial, added: 鈥淎n intensive care doctor will see roughly 15,000 patients by the time they retire. Yet this system has seen nearly 100,000 patients, it has the life time experience of 8 doctors, and has learned from each of those cases what the best decisions were for each situation.鈥�

The next step for AI Clinician is to trial it in UK hospitals, and prospectively assess decision making using real-time data. This cutting-edge work is a direct result of the unique Imperial BRC ethos that brings together engineers and clinicians to solve real health problems and improve healthcare. It was led by Dr Matthieu Komorowski, a clinician who obtained a PhD in Artificial Intelligence with the two senior authors. Dr Faisal commented: 鈥淲e broke down boundaries and silos that held back traditional approaches to healthcare, by training a novel generation of PhD students to look at AI and Healthcare as one problem, not two.鈥�

The work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and 蓝莓视频 Imperial BRC. You can read the original press release, including a statement from Health Minister Lord O’Shaughnessy, .