Encourage the involvement of young researchers in the creation of tech-enabled solutions to address issues or support healthcare professionals. This was the motto of the two international competitions CLEF Challenge 2023 and SCCM Datathon 2023, where several INESC TEC members reached the first place.
Image CLEF Challenge 2023
The Image CLEF Medical GANs was one of the challenges part of the Image CLEF Challenge 2023, organised as part of the European initiative CLEF (Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum); this event aims to promote research, innovation and development of information access systems focused on multimodal data, gathered in large quantities or from different scenarios. In the first edition, which took place between September 18 and 21, the participants were challenged to develop a system capable of assessing whether synthetic medical images threatened the patients’ privacy. In other words, the idea was to classify whether a set of real images had been used in the training of the Artificial Intelligence model that designed the synthetic images.
The team from INESC TEC Centre for Telecommunications and Multimedia (CTM) reached the first place, competing alongside seven other teams. Helena Montenegro, Pedro Neto, Cristiano Patrício, Isabel Rio-Torto, Tiago Gonçalves and Luís F. Teixeira were able to present the best solution to the problem, which automatically calculated the structural similarity between each real image and all synthetic ones; moreover, and concerning the synthetic images whose similarity with the real ones was higher than the normal values, they were classified as having been used.
“Winning an international competition values our research and improves our confidence in the methodologies we develop and their results. In addition, it is always motivating to know that our work is acknowledged internationally”, mentioned the winners.
SCCM Datathon 2023
The Discover Datathon 2023, promoted by the Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM), took place in New York on August 5 and 6. This collaborative event brings together the clinical and technological communities towards the development of models applicable to the care of critically ill patients, using existing public databases.
This year’s edition focused on three topics: “COVID-19”, “Health Equity” and “Patient Safety”.
Regarding the “Patient Safety” challenge, the winning team featured João Matos, CTM researcher, Andrew Barros, David Thomas Poliner and Enrique Monares Zepeda, representing the medical community, and Nikolaj Andersen, Rishika Iytha Sridhar and Vishwasrao Salunkhe, who are active in the scientific domain. This group presented the solution “What Are the Key Factors Influencing Glucose Variability in Point-of-Care and Serum Measurements?”, which aimed to understand whether there were differences between medical devices to measure glucose at ICUs. Said differences were analysed from a patients’ safety perspective and considered harmful whenever they led to hidden hypoglycaemia events.
In the task related to the theme of “Health Equity”, the winning group explored the question “Does Limited English Proficiency Affect Time-to-Death for Critically Ill Patients Who Expire in the Hospital?”; the goal was to understand whether the ability to speak English had an impact on the time that patients remained in the hospital – from hospitalisation in critical condition to potential death. The team consisted of Tiago Gonçalves, CTM researcher, Aarti Sarwal, Cassandra V. Villegas, and Steven Ham, representing the medical community, and Joseph Geibig, Lorenzo Flores, and Vedant Joshi, who carry out work scientific activities.
“During the event, we faced problems and areas of knowledge completely new to us; we had the opportunity to meet and interact with experts in these fields and present a solution. This process is highly demanding, but rewarding”, stated the CTM researchers.
The winners will now have a new opportunity to present their solution at the SCCM Critical Care Congress in Arizona (U.S.A.) in January 2024 – where they will receive an award for their contributions.
The researchers mentioned in this news piece are associated with INESC TEC and UP-FEUP.
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