POTENTIAL HONOURS PROJECTS 2007/8

 

 

Data Analysis / Theory Revision of Real-time Medical Data sets

The sophisticated equipment installed in hospitals to support patient treatment (such as dialysis machines & monitors in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) ) produce data at very frequent intervals which are used by clinicians when they are treating patients, but are not routinely analysed in greater detail “off line” to look for interesting trends and inconsistencies. We are involved in 2 large scale collaborations with the Dialysis unit at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and an ICU in a major Glasgow hospital. To date we have:

-          produced infrastructure which standardizes the information collected from several units into a single format in a centralized data base;

-          we have preformed a number of preliminary analyses eg with the dialysis unit we have shown it is possible using the data collected from the dialysis machines & some background information on patients, to detect ones who are most likely to have hypo-tensive events during dialysis.

-          We are enhancing the infrastructure so we can perform more easily a range of analyses of the above kind.

 

Potential projects include:

-          enhancing the infrastructure in various ways so for instance to enable the minimum, maximum and average of a specified sequence of data points to be calculated;

-          perform a number of studies using the current infrastructure which could have clinical relevance; for instance to detect ICU patients who encounter minor cardiac problems which tend to go currently undetected;

-          investigate the effect of raised temperature has on the rate of patient recovery;

-          more ambitiously, formulate predictions as to how patients will respond in various circumstances & detect deviations from these expectations.

 

We would be happy to have upto 2 students working on these projects.

 

Supervision: Derek Sleeman & Laura Moss (Research Student)

Language: JAVA

 

 

Your own project

I would be happy to discuss projects which you are proposing.

 

As I shall be travelling during the period when you might come to talk about projects please email me or Laura Moss to discuss details:  {d.sleeman,  lmoss} AT abdn.ac.uk