"Prehospital Trauma Care: Trauma PitStop and PH Resuscitation Strategies" / "Towards Meaningful Reinforcement Learning in Surgery"

"Prehospital Trauma Care: Trauma PitStop and PH resuscitation Strategies"
Presenter: AP Deeb (advisor: Dr. Joshua Brown)

Dr. Deeb will revisit the ever common, and deleterious (for some) trauma pit stop in a more robust fashion. He will review the meaning of the pit stop and the impact on patient outcomes and identify which patients this PH decision negatively impacts, as well as a briefly foray into the role of the NTC, while incorporating a propensity matched analysis to account for the wide range of patient factors affecting this decision. Lastly, to build on the PH resuscitation progress, he will present very preliminary secondary data from the STAAMP trial evaluating potential synergy between PH resuscitative strategies. 

"Towards Meaningful Reinforcement Learning in Surgery"
Presenter: Tanner Wilson (advisor: Dr. Gilles Clermont) 

Reinforcement learning is a branch of machine learning which generates a policy for optimally navigating a series of actions. This simple concept has led to major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence in recent years, including in robotics, game-playing algorithms, and most recently in clinical medicine. In this talk, Dr. Wilson will present recent developments of reinforcement learning as applied to critical care, provide an overview of his group's work in developing meaningful reinforcement learning-based algorithms for surgical decision-making, and propose future directions in the fields of critical care and emergency general surgery. In addition to developing algorithms that will guide patient care, he will show how his team's work might also yield insights into the psychology of surgical decision-making.