In medical research, a dynamic treatment regime (DTR), adaptive intervention, or adaptive treatment strategy is a set of rules for choosing effective treatments for individual patients.
Historically,
medical research
Medical research (or biomedical research), also known as experimental medicine, encompasses a wide array of research, extending from "basic research" (also called ''bench science'' or ''bench research''), – involving fundamental scientif ...
and the practice of medicine tended to rely on an
acute care model for the treatment of all medical problems, including
chronic illness
A chronic condition is a health condition or disease that is persistent or otherwise long-lasting in its effects or a disease that comes with time. The term ''chronic'' is often applied when the course of the disease lasts for more than three mo ...
.
Treatment choices made for a particular patient under a dynamic regime are based on that individual's characteristics and history, with the goal of optimizing his or her long-term clinical outcome. A dynamic treatment regime is analogous to a ''policy'' in the field of
reinforcement learning, and analogous to a
controller in
control theory. While most work on dynamic treatment regimes has been done in the context of medicine, the same ideas apply to time-varying policies in other fields, such as education, marketing, and economics.
See also
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Personalized medicine
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Reinforcement learning
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Q learning
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Optimal control
Optimal control theory is a branch of mathematical optimization that deals with finding a control for a dynamical system over a period of time such that an objective function is optimized. It has numerous applications in science, engineering and ...
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Multi-armed bandit
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Dynamic Treatment Regimes
Clinical research