June 25, 2015
Aridhia Informatics today announced a two-year funded collaboration with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, the University of Glasgow and Philips Healthcare. The Edinburgh-based clinical informatics company will provide its data science expertise and AnalytiXagility platform to the study which will develop technology enabling the analysis of high frequency neurological data to better inform the diagnosis and treatment of patients with traumatic brain injuries.
The study has been awarded funding by Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, though the Digital Health in a Connected Hospital Collaborative Research and Development competition, and follows the success of an earlier pilot project which saw Aridhia and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde reduce the time taken to process sample data from patients with traumatic brain injuries from 16 hours to 48 minutes and demonstrated the clear advantages of using advanced analytics in a clinical setting.
Building on the pilot, this expanded project will analyse live streams of vast amounts of physiological and clinical data collected in a real-time clinical setting, before translating it into clinically relevant information to allow rapid treatment decisions to be made at the bedside. By employing advanced data processing techniques, AnalytiXagility will enable previously unavailable models and algorithms to inform evidence-based decision making and in the future impact patient outcomes.
The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2020 traumatic brain injuries will be a major cause of death and disability. In Europe alone the cost of managing these injuries already exceeds €100 billion annually.
As part of the project, Aridhia will create an app to enable clinical teams in the neurointensive care unit to select which algorithm to run on a particular patient’s data, supporting a rapid and personalised approach to treatment. The app will then translate the results of the analysis back into the clinical setting to inform the best course of care for individual patients.
The collaboration draws on the expertise of a multidisciplinary team of scientists and clinicians led by Dr Laura Moss, a Research and Development Healthcare Computer Scientist with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s Department of Clinical Physics and Bioengineering. The University of Glasgow’s Department of Anaesthesia, Pain & Critical Care will offer clinical input to the project, while Philips’ bedside monitoring equipment will provide the patient data that will be analysed.
Dr Moss said: “We expect this project to show that it is possible to analyse huge volumes of real-time neurological data and put the results back into clinical practice in such a way that will improve patient treatment. This could really revolutionise clinical decision-making around head injuries because, until now, this information has not been routinely available to clinicians.”
Chris Roche, CEO at Aridhia stated: “Traumatic brain injuries are a growing public health issue and it is essential that we take an innovative approach to improving the diagnosis and treatment of these very serious injuries. This project demonstrates the importance of big data science in the clinical setting and the capability of Aridhia’s AnalytiXagility platform in providing a high performance infrastructure to analyse vast amounts of data in a real-time environment.”
The project will use anonymised data from patients in the neurointensive care unit at the Institute of Neurological Sciences, Glasgow, part of the new South Glasgow University Hospital, one of the biggest and most technologically advanced campuses in Europe.
Collaborative R&D:
As the UK’s innovation agency, one of the main roles of Innovate UK is to achieve business and economic growth for the UK. One way the organisation supports this is through funding innovative Collaborative Research and Development (CR&D) projects. Collaborative research and development (R&D) encourages businesses and researchers to work together on innovative projects in strategically important areas of science, engineering and technology – from which successful new products, processes and services can emerge, contributing to business and economic growth. Find out more about the CR&D programme here.