Abstract

Sedative medications are routinely administered to provide comfort and facilitate clinical care in critically ill ICU patients. Prior work shows that brain monitoring using electroencephalography (EEG) to track sedation levels may help medical personnel to optimize drug dosing and avoid the adverse effects of oversedation and undersedation. However, the performance of sedation monitoring methods proposed to date deal poorly with individual variability across patients, leading to inconsistent performance. To address this challenge we develop an online learning approach based on Adaptive Regularization of Weight Vectors (AROW). Our approach adaptively updates a sedation level prediction algorithm under a continuously evolving data distribution. The prediction model is gradually calibrated for individual patients in response to EEG observations and routine clinical assessments over time. The evaluations are performed on a population of 172 sedated ICU patients whose sedation levels were assessed using the Richmond Agitation-Sedation Scale (scores between -5 = comatose and 0 = awake). The proposed adaptive model achieves better performance than the same model without adaptation (average accuracies with tolerance of one level difference: 68.76% vs. 61.10%). Moreover, our approach is shown to be robust to sudden changes caused by label noise. Medication administrations have different effects on model performance. We find that the model performs best in patients receiving only propofol, compared to patients receiving no sedation or multiple simultaneous sedative medications.