Summer of Research project by Yicheng Shi, University of Auckland, supervised by Quentin Thurier (Orion Health). Clinical data, collected by healthcare providers when treating patients, is incredibly valuable for medical research – but good data is hard to get. This information can help researchers improve healthcare. For example, by studying a patient’s medical history, researchers …
Summer of Research project by Lucy McSweeney, University of Auckland, supervised by Dr Michael O’Sullivan Jnr (University of Auckland) Creating a model of how patients and staff use and provide services at a health clinic can help that clinic operate more efficiently. Dargaville Medical Centre (DMC) is a large General Practice in Northland with 12 …
Summer of Research project by James Zhang, University of Auckland, supervised by Dr Michael O’Sullivan Jnr (University of Auckland). New software could flag issues early during operations, helping surgeons and anaesthetists intervene before serious complications arise. We need to find out how much of a difference this software makes, and whether it will prevent complications …
Summer of Research project by Harper Shen, University of Auckland, supervised by Quentin Thurier (Orion Health) and Dr Yun Sing Koh (University of Auckland). Neural networks can be great at solving problems, but they sometimes give wrong answers. Would you trust an algorithm that got life-saving information right 80% of the time? It is easier …
Summer of Research project by Enno Huang, University of Auckland, supervised by Edmond Zhang (Orion Health and Precision Driven Health) and Yun Sing Koh (University of Auckland). “2 yo F here for an RPE w/a recent URI who c/o ear pain y/d.” If you can’t understand that sentence from a real paediatric note, you are …
Summer of Research project by student Aaron Zhang (The University of Auckland), supervised by Dr Edmond Zhang (Orion Health). It takes time and money to train specialist medical algorithms, and medical-specific data is hard to obtain for research, but the payoff may well be worth it. Aaron Zhang’s research shows machine learning algorithms based on …
Summer of Research project by Hamish Huggard, University of Auckland, supervised by Dr Edmond Zhang (Precision Driven Health and Orion Health). Automatically identifying drug names, dosages and effects in health records could help researchers find relationships between certain medications and negative effects on patients. An adverse drug event (ADE) is when something bad happens to …
This feasibility study, in partnership with Vensa Health, is answering the following questions: How can we accurately automate interpretation and dissemination of lab results to save clinician time, while keeping the clinical control in their hands in way that’s intuitive and flexible? Can collective best practices be gathered and help improve clinical decision making based …
Countering bias in the health system Heart disease is the leading cause of preventable mortality in Aotearoa, New Zealand. It is a disease which disproportionately affects certain groups such as Māori – who have higher rates of ischaemic heart disease (or coronary heart disease) and stroke but have lower access to health care. It is …
The “black box” metaphor is commonly used to refer to the lack of understanding of how modern Machine Learning (ML) systems make decisions. Researchers are actively trying to remedy this situation which is especially problematic in healthcare, largely because legal accountability and ethics have greater emphasis and importance in the healthcare decision-making process than in …