桃瘾社区

桃瘾社区 Magazine

Making Great Strides in Healthtech

Posted
July 11, 2022
a phone with a stethoscope merging health and technology

From CT scans to at-home COVID tests, technology is revolutionizing healthcare. By working across disciplines, faculty at 桃瘾社区 are turning groundbreaking ideas into reality.

Juan Shan, PhD, an associate professor of computer science in the Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems, is focused on applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyzing medical imaging鈥攖hings like breast ultrasounds and knee MRIs. The basic idea is to take advantage of those advanced models in machine learning and apply those to the medical domain to help solve medical problems.

鈥淚n computer science, we know more about machine learning and computer vision techniques than about medical problems,鈥 Shan says. 鈥淏ut we want to apply these techniques to help doctors solve the medical domain problems.鈥

Shan and her students are using machine learning and computer vision techniques to help doctors solve problems detecting the precise details of a tumor more accurately and efficiently or providing a second opinion on the severity of knee osteoarthritis.

鈥淢y students here at 桃瘾社区 get involved in my research projects,鈥 she says. 鈥淩esearch informs my teaching, and I can always bring new ideas back to my classroom and discuss them with my students.鈥

Shan and her doctoral students design Computer Aided Diagnosis Systems (CADs), systems that are programmed to do particular tasks鈥攑inpoint location, measure joints, estimate size. Her primary focus is developing robust and efficient CAD algorithms to help doctors analyze medical images, discover distinguishing features, and classify data utilizing machine learning methods.

In one recent research endeavor, for example, Shan created a system where a computer was able to estimate the severity of osteoarthritis in a hand after learning how to read and interpret thousands of X-rays鈥攁 technique that Shan says helps save on labor and time for medical professionals that would otherwise be manually diagnosing the severity of the osteoarthritis.

鈥淩esearch informs my teaching, and I can always bring new ideas back to my classroom and discuss them with my students.鈥 鈥擩uan Shan, PhD

At the College of Health Professions, Assistant Professor John Damiao, PhD, has spent the past several years figuring out how to leverage gains in scanning technologies to build customized wheelchairs tailored toward the needs of an individual user. His work makes the wheelchairs more comfortable, and potentially helps reduce the risk of future injury.

鈥淭raditionally, the wheelchair user is seated in a molding bag that makes an imprint of their shape,鈥 says Damiao. 鈥淭he molding bag is hardened, and that bag shape is scanned, sent off to a company and they make a cushion from that imprint.鈥

But his work is driving a paradigm shift in how wheelchair seats are constructed.

鈥淭he problem with the traditional method is that the person is sitting in a loaded fashion, and their body contours are being distorted from sitting in a loaded fashion,鈥 he says. 鈥淭he innovation in my research is scanning the person directly, or in an unloaded position, which should make for a more accurate custom contoured seat.鈥

Custom contoured seating refers to wheelchair seating systems to fit people with severe deformities鈥攚hether its postural or a skeletal deformity, and they can鈥檛 sit in a typical linear wheelchair seating system because it would cause discomfort, or eventually cause pressure ulcers because of the mismatching of their shape to what is a typical wheelchair seat shape, explains Damiao.

Pressure injuries kill 60,000 people are a year and are, as Damiao describes, a 鈥$10 billion per year problem.鈥 Damiao鈥檚 inventive use of custom-contoured seating utilizes ever-improving technology to potentially save lives.

As a 21st century occupational therapist, Damiao understands that, while academic research is vital and will continue to be vital, it is just as important to be able to leverage technological advances to implement changes rapidly. He hopes that increased interdisciplinary collaboration鈥攆or instance, better collaboration between those developing healthcare technologies and researchers鈥攃an help take the theoretical into the practical much faster, and thus positively impact lives.

As per the work of Shan and Damiao, it seems that when it comes to the intersection of health and tech, 桃瘾社区 is certainly building an effective algorithm.

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