e/MTIC AI-Lab becomes fourth TU/e ICAI Lab
In the field of healthcare, AI still has several issues to address. In hospitals, professionals are still hesitant to employ AI-based techniques because of lack of transparency, interpretability and clinical evidence.
Through the e/MTIC AI-Lab, AI will be made available to work in close collaboration with the clinical staff and MedTech industries to help improve personalized treatment. This lab has now also joined ICAI and is the fourth TU/e ICAI lab. ICAI is a network of Dutch research programs that is designed to bring together researchers in the field of AI. e/MTIC is a unique collaboration between Eindhoven University of Technology, Catharina Hospital, Maxima Medical Center, Kempenhaeghe Epilepsy and Sleep Center and Philips to enable a fast track to high-tech health innovations.
AI techniques mostly act as a black box without knowing precisely what part of the data is being used and how. Furthermore, AI tends to be specialized and lacks robustness when small changes to existing procedures are required. In these cases, human doctors are still much better able to handle the complexity of the situation. However, that does not mean that the work of humans is always correct, but they are able to weigh up when it is necessary to ask for help from someone else, for example, something AI cannot do today.
New Healthcare Systems
In healthcare, systems are continuously evolving and the ability of specialists to fully understand the complex inter-relationships of the various components is becoming more difficult. It will be particularly important for this information to be organized, not just using new forms of presentation such as virtual reality and digital twins but also by linking models of information to predict what the doctor should see next.
These new systems must be designed in a manner to protect people, the environment and the economy. ‘Responsible AI’ is a term that is usually applied to dealing with consumers or private individuals. For healthcare, this encompasses responsible use and storage of sensitive personal data, but also promotion of patient empowerment, avoidance of harm and bias, and protection against misuse.
E/MTIC ICAI Research Focus
Many of the e/MTIC researchers are currently working on and implementing analysis techniques and (prediction) algorithms for improved (patient) monitoring and diagnosis and to help optimize individual treatment strategies in collaboration with many medical specialists. Due to the many complexity and heterogeneities in medical data, these approaches and other innovations will be further developed, implemented and automated through projects in e/MTIC. The research focus is on robustness and improved stability of algorithms and methods.
In the e/MTIC ICAI lab, AI will be mainly used for the following application areas:
- Imaging: strongly enhanced Ultrasound, MRI and CT imaging by embedding task-adaptive AI across the imaging chain
- Patient monitoring: strongly enhanced monitoring of vital signs both in clinical and in extramural settings
- Clinical decision support systems: Use AI to combine various data streams (e.g. EMR, images, spot checks) to produce explainable and patient-specific advice, early warning and alarms.
The academic directors of the lab are professors Frans van de Vosse and Jan Bergmans. Carmen van Vilsteren is the lab manager.
Fast Track to Clinical Innovation
Given that the main purpose of e/MTIC is to provide a “Fast track to clinical innovation”, Artificial Intelligence is an extremely important instrument to support this goal. Both in clinical decision support in general, and in-patient monitoring and image analysis in particular, novel AI techniques provide powerful approaches to identify patient deterioration at an earlier stage, diagnose conditions more accurately, better guide treatment, and improve secondary prevention.
Eindhoven Medtech Innovation Center
Bringing technical innovations all the way from early research to implementation and commercialization can often take a long time. In healthcare innovation, in particular, this lost time can often equate to lost lives. The goal of the Eindhoven MedTech Innovation Center (e/MTIC) is to create and expand an ecosystem that strongly increases the speed of high-tech health innovation, maximizing value for patients. We consider such an ecosystem to be an unmet need and a unique opportunity for the Brainport region to make significant contributions to visionary new developments in healthcare.
e/MTIC is a large-scale research collaboration between the Catharina Hospital (CH), the Maxima Medical Center (MMC), Kempenhaeghe Epilepsy and Sleep Center (KH), Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and Royal Philips Eindhoven (RPE) in the domains cardiovascular medicine, perinatal medicine and sleep medicine. The partnership has evolved over several decades, has a strong scientific and valorization track record and currently encompasses around 100 PhD students, supervised by a similar number of experts from the various partners.