SMITH: Smart Medical Information Technology for Healthcare Project

The SMITH project started in January 2018 and has been granted funding for four years by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research as one of four consortia funded by the German Medical Informatics Initiative. The project’s goal is to make better use of the wealth of patient data in order to validate the relevance of novel diagnostic and therapeutic methods in systematic trials and thus directly improve patient care. One goal is to optimize the diagnosis and therapy of intensive care unit (ICU) patients with lung failure. The demand for intensive care medicine will increase over the next 10-15 years. This can be explained by the epidemiological challenges in Germany. Thus, there is a need for improvement that is especially urgent in patients suffering from acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). University Hospital RWTH Aachen, RWTH Aachen University, Bayer AG, and JSC are collaborating in the clinical use case Algorithmic Surveillance of ICU patients (ASIC) within SMITH with a particular focus on ARDS. In order to predict individual disease progression in these patients, ASIC will utilize machine learning as well as established mechanistic systems medicine models, complemented by high-performance computing, and integrated in a hybrid virtual patient model. The ASIC use case will also contribute to the development of an online, rule-based computerized decision-support system. The JSC Cross Sectional Team Deep Learning is supporting the project with deep learning, machine learning, HPC access, and statistical modelling expertise.
(Contact: Prof. Morris Riedel, m.riedel@fz-juelich.de)

from JSC News No. 258, 30 May 2018