Improving clinical decision making by creating surrogate models from health technology assessment models: A case...

Computerized clinical decision support systems (CDSS) that incorporate the latest scientific evidence are essential for enhancing patient care quality. Such systems typically rely on some kind of model to accurately represent the knowledge required to assess the clinicians. Although the use of complex and computationally demanding simulation models is common in this field, such models limit the potential applications of CDSSs, both in real-time applications and in simulation-in-the-loop optimization tools. This paper presents a case study on Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM) to demonstrate the development of surrogate models from health technology assessment models, with the aim of enhancing the potential of CDSSs.

The paper details the process of developing machine learning (ML) based surrogate models, including the generation of a dataset for training and testing, and the comparison of different ML techniques. A number of distinct groupings of comorbidities were utilized in the creation of models, which were trained to predict confidence intervals for the time to develop each complication.

The results of the intersection over union (IoU) analysis between the simulation model output and the surrogate models output for the comorbidities under study were greater than 0.9.

The study concludes that ML-based surrogate models are a viable solution for real-time clinical decision-making, offering a substantial speedup in execution time compared to traditional simulation models.