Inno Health Hub
Inno Health Hub is a seven-months medical technology development program in which 30 medical and engineering students from different study levels develop innovative solutions for the use of large data or genomic data in cancer diagnostics.
The aim of the initiative is to bring together students from two fields – medicine and engineering – to work in four teams and develop digital technology prototypes to solve some oncology diagnostics challenges in Latvia. In the course of the project, to each team mentors are assigned – researchers and practitioners, as well as specialists in the field of artificial intelligence development. In this way, the teams’ progress is greatly accelerated so that solutions can be validated as soon as possible in medical institutions and/or used to write new scientific publications.
The teams are lead by prominent experts: innovation developer Kaspars Eglītis and computerscientist Emil Syundyukov.
The
challenges Inno Health Hub students face are, one, the use of large data in the
field of cancer genetics, diagnosis and prediction in pediatrics, and, two, the
use of artificial intelligence in the analysis of large or genomic data for
early cancer diagnosis in high resolution images. The students have divided in 4 teams to work on 4 different innovative tools as solutions.
Some of the prototypes to be developed are:
- Use of computer vision for automated detection of spine metastases;
- Analysis of physician opinions and compilation of conclusions using large language models;
- Analysis of genomic data and analysis of symptoms to predict patients' cancer predisposition for timely diagnosis of pediatric oncology.
“Inno Health Hub is an ambitious project. One of the greatest challenges is related to the caution of medical institutions and the insufficiently developed workflow for the implementation of digital solutions,” says Kaspars Eglītis, one of the Inno Health Hub leaders. “There is a lot of data in the papers that need to be initialized. The digitized data is carefully protected. And even if teams have access to data, the digital solution needs to be validated thoroughly, which is hindered by the relatively poor amount of data for AI. I therefore think it is extremely worthwhile that the project creates interdisciplinary teams and allows external experts to be easily recruited as mentors. This leads to the prospect of teams having enough knowledge to successfully overcome both legal and technical challenges.”
The unique programme with the support of the technology company Mikrotīkls Ltd. is organised by RTU Development Fund and RTU Science and Innovation Centre Design Factory.