Septoplasty and turbinectomy are among the most frequentbut also most debated interventions in the field of rhinology. A previouslydeveloped tool enhances surgery planning by physical aspects of respi-ration, i.e., for the first time a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm iscombined with large-scale computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simula-tions to plan anti-obstructive surgery. In the current study, an improve-ment of the tool’s predictive capabilities is investigated for the afore-mentioned types of surgeries by considering two approaches: (i) trainingof parallel environments is executed on multiple ranks and the agentsof each environment share their experience in a pre-defined interval and(ii) for some of the state-reward combinations the CFD solver is replacedby a Gaussian process regression (GPR) model for an improved compu-tational efficiency. It is found that employing a parallel RL algorithmimproves the reliability of the surgery planning tool in finding the globaloptimum. However, parallel training leads to a larger number of state-reward combinations that need to be computed by the CFD solver. Thisoverhead is compensated by replacing some of the computations withthe GPR algorithm, i.e., around 6% of the computations can be savedwithout significantly degrading the predictions’ accuracy. Nevertheless,increasing the number of state-reward combinations predicted by theGPR algorithm only works to a certain extent, since this also leads tolarger errors.
Rüttgers et al. (Wed,) studied this question.