A data mining approach for optimization of acute inflammation therapy

Acute inflammation is a medical condition which occurs over seconds, minutes or hours and is characterized as a systemic inflammatory response to an infection. Delaying treatment by only one hour decreases patient chance of survival by about 7%. Therefore, there is a critical need for tools that can aid therapy optimization for this potentially fatal condition. Towards this objective we developed a data driven approach for therapy optimization where a predictive model for patients´ behavior is learned directly from historical data. As such, the predictive model is incorporated into a model predictive control optimization algorithm to find optimal therapy, which will lead the patient to a healthy state. To save on the cost of clinical trials and potential failure, we evaluated our model on a population of virtual patients capable of emulating the inflammatory response. Patients are treated with two drugs for which dosage and timing are critical for the outcome of the treatment. Our results show significant improvement in percentage of healthy outcomes comparing to previously proposed methods for acute inflammation treatment found in literature and in clinical practice. In particular, application of our method rescued 88% of patients that would otherwise die within 168 hours due to septic or aseptic state. In contrast, the best method from literature rescued only 73% of patients.