Big data and targeted machine learning in action to assist medical decision in the ICU

Abstract Historically, personalised medicine has been synonymous with pharmacogenomics and oncology. We argue for a new framework for personalised medicine analytics that capitalises on more detailed patient-level data and leverages recent advances in causal inference and machine learning tailored towards decision support applicable to critically ill patients. We discuss how advances in data technology and statistics are providing new opportunities for asking more targeted questions regarding patient treatment, and how this can be applied in the intensive care unit to better predict patient-centred outcomes, help in the discovery of new treatment regimens associated with improved outcomes, and ultimately how these rules can be learned in real-time for the patient.