Proud to announce that Oliver Stiff has been awarded the Eric Laithwaite prize 2021 for his work on "Patient similarity retrieval based on laboratory data cluster analysis and visualisation". The price is awarded to an undergraduate student in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering for outstanding innovation in the final year individual project.
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Patient similarity retrieval based on laboratory data cluster analysis and visualisation
Stiff Oliver, Pantelis Georgiou, and Bernard Hernandez
M.Eng. in Electronic and Information Engineering 2021
Large scale medical datasets and electronic health records have become increasingly common, prompting the creation of clinical decision support systems which utilise data to enhance health care. Tools have been designed to predict the likelihood of infection, automate drug dosing and prescriptions, and evaluate a patient’s risk of death. Adoption, however, remains low due to inherent issues, most notably, concern from clinicians regarding the quality of recommendations and lack of transparency about how results are obtained. This report covers the design and implementation of a system that uses laboratory test data to retrieve and present information relevant to a current patient, allowing clinicians to make quicker diagnoses and create tailored treatment plans based on past data. Thus, using the increasing amount of healthcare data without impinging on clinicians’ diagnosis and decision-making process and avoiding the typical objections to automated systems. The proposed solution incorporates the results of dimensionality reduction and clustering algorithms into an interactive, web-based similarity retrieval application, demonstrating the potential of unsupervised-learning based tools in clinical settings.