# RL for clinical treatment and surgery

Area: [Deep reinforcement learning methods](https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/index.md). HTML: https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/rl-for-clinical-treatment-and-surgery/

## Key facts

- RL for clinical treatment and surgery: 98 papers on arXiv since 2024 (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- 4 of its 98 mapped papers (4%) cite “DTR-Bench: An in silico Environment and Benchmark Platform for Reinforcement Learning Based Dynamic Treatment Regime” (2024, arXiv 2405.18610).
- 3 of its 98 mapped papers (3%) cite “Autonomous navigation of catheters and guidewires in mechanical thrombectomy using inverse reinforcement learning” (2024, arXiv 2406.12499).
- 3 new papers 30 Sep–14 Oct.

## Most cited here

- [DTR-Bench: An in silico Environment and Benchmark Platform for Reinforcement Learning Based Dynamic Treatment Regime](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18610/) (2024), cited by 4 papers here
- [Autonomous navigation of catheters and guidewires in mechanical thrombectomy using inverse reinforcement learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12499/) (2024), cited by 3 papers here
- [A Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning Strategy for Autonomous Guidewire Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02777/) (2024), cited by 2 papers here
- [ICU-Sepsis: A Benchmark MDP Built from Real Medical Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05646/) (2024), cited by 2 papers here
- [Reinforcement Learning for Safe Autonomous Two Device Navigation of Cerebral Vessels in Mechanical Thrombectomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24140/) (2025), cited by 2 papers here
- [Model-Free Reinforcement Learning for Automated Fluid Administration in Critical Care](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06299/) (2024), cited by 1 papers here
- [TractOracle: towards an anatomically-informed reward function for RL-based tractography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17845/) (2024), cited by 1 papers here
- [Methodology for Interpretable Reinforcement Learning for Optimizing Mechanical Ventilation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03105/) (2024), cited by 1 papers here
- [How Consistent are Clinicians? Evaluating the Predictability of Sepsis Disease Progression with Dynamics Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07148/) (2024), cited by 1 papers here
- [Medical Knowledge Integration into Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Dynamic Treatment Regimes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00364/) (2024), cited by 1 papers here

## New (30 Sep–14 Oct)

- [Reinforcement Learning In Partially Verifiable Environments for Colon Cancer Treatment Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17426/) (2026-10-12)
- [TrustMed-RL: Long-Horizon Reinforcement Learning for Evidence-Grounded Clinical Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04387/) (2026-10-03)
- [Patient-Centered Treatment Planning for Chronic Multimorbidity: A Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Framework for Preference Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39911/) (2026-09-30)