Prof. Yuan-Ting Zhang, Hong Kong Center for Cerebro-cardiovascular Health Engineering (COCHE) Wearable "SUPER-MINDS" for the Precision Control of CVDs and COVIDs

ABSTRACT: The cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) and coronavirus diseases (COVIDs) are the most current pressing health challenges globally today. This talk will attempt to address the grand challenges through the paradigm shift to Health Informatics and discuss the convergence approach to integrate technologies across multiple scales in the biological hierarchy from molecular, cell, organ to system for diseases prevention. The presentation will focus on the development of wearable ‘SUPER-MINDS' technologies and their integrations with unobtrusive sensing, biomarker detection, biomedical imaging and machine learning for the early prediction of acute CVDs. Potential applications in the fast response and precise control of COVID-19 will also be discussed. Using the atherosclerotic plaque assessment as an example, this talk will illustrate that the health convergence approach should allow the practice of 8- P's proactive medicine that is predictive, preventive, precise, pervasive, personalized, participatory, preemptive, and patient-centralized.

Andrew Laine, EMBS Past President and BHI-TC Past Chair Dimitris Fotiadis, JBHI EiC and BHI Conf. Chair Metin Akay, EMBS President, University of Houston Stephen Wong, BHI-TC Past Chair Yuan-Ting Zhang, JBHI Past EiC, BHI Conf. Past Chair

Prof. Alison Noble, Professor in Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford, UK Simplifying interpretation and acquisition of ultrasound scans

ABSTRACT: With the increased availability of low-cost and handheld ultrasound probes, there is interest in simplifying interpretation and acquisition of ultrasound scans through deep-learning based analysis so that ultrasound can be used more widely in healthcare. However, this is not just "all about the algorithm", and successful innovation requires inter-disciplinary thinking and collaborations.

In this talk I will overview progress in this area drawing on examples of my laboratory's experiences of working with partners on multi-modal ultrasound imaging, and building assistive algorithms and devices for pregnancy health assessment in high-income and low-and-middle-income country settings. Emerging topics in this area will also be discussed.

Guests: Maria Teresa Arredondo, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain; Doris Bamiou, University College of London, UK; Elazer R. Edelman, ΜΙΤ, US; Norbert Graf, University of the Saarland, Germany; Peter Stone, Harvard Medical School, US

Prof George Panos, BSc(Biomed. Eng.), CEng, MIET, MD, PhD, DTM&H(Lon), FRCP. Former Professor, Internal Medicine, School of Medicine of the University of Cyprus and at the Nicosia General Hospital Internal Medicine Clinic TITLE: Technological Challenges to assist in the clinical management towards the Pandemic Response

ABSTRACT:

COVID-19 pandemic created tremendous pressure of patient load on the health systems and especially in hospitals challenging their ability to effectively monitor COVID-19 inpatients disease progression and provide the appropriate treatment in a timely manner. Approximately 4% of COVID 19 positive patients need hospitalization and of these an estimated 2.5% end up in ICUs and Units for Special Care. Technological challenges to record and manage the mounting epidemiological and clinical data which ultimately translated to patients' health, inevitably led to the design and implementation of a unified electronic surveillance and management platform almost immediately by the medical and engineering community that ingeniously utilized technological devices and IT solutions to deliver a real time web based covid-19 electronic health record. This covid-19 eHealth platform is categorized in three main sections a) Demographics, allergies, comorbidities, symptoms and date of symptoms onset including a self-assessment of symptom severity development by time and date, vital signs, oxymetry, current medication b) Hospital admission details (bed/ward/department), patient summary and continuous cumulative graph depictions of vital signs, oxygen status (oximetry SpO2/FiO2 and/or blood gases pO2/FiO2) and scoring systems (e.g. Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, Modified Early Warning System and Glasgow Coma Scale), ECG-QTc estimation c) Daily comprehensive real-time web based COVID-19 electronic health record (patient history, clinical examination, lab exams, treatment regimens) with simple timeline statistical permutation depictions.

Professor Joshua S Weitz, Tom and Marie Patton Professor of Biological Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, US TITLE: Modeling, Interventions, and the Ongoing Need for Pandemic Response and Mitigation Instruments

ABSTRACT: The Covid-19 pandemic continues to impact the health and well-being of communities all across the globe. From the outset, epidemic theory and models have played a key role in advancing understanding of the potential threat and in shaping public health responses. In this talk, I will highlight both near- and long-term challenges in controlling Covid-19. In doing so, I will focus on efforts to characterize non-canonical features of spread (including gathering-associated risk, behavioral feedback, and the impacts of heterogeneity) as well as efforts to use testing (including PCR and serological tests) as a means to mitigate and control spread. In closing, I will also highlight lessons learned and ongoing opportunities for use-inspired theory and modeling initiatives to enhance response, decision-making, and mitigation instruments.

Prof. Vimla L Patel, Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies in Medicine and Public Health at the New York Academy of Medicine, US Improving Consideration of Social and Cognitive Behaviors in Advancing Informatics Technologies for Health Care

ABSTRACT: The modern landscape is being shaped by complex converging forces that will cause shifts in how we deliver and use health care. As we embrace inevitable technological advances, social and cognitive factors will need to be a major part of the discussion, with a focus on the users of the technical innovations. Current efforts to advance this goal have already started. However, there is still a disparity between the users' knowledge and expectations of the technical systems being introduced and their lay beliefs, limited mental models of the technology, and their cognitive representations of illness and disease. Social cognition is predicated upon the belief that both patients and clinicians are predisposed to see the world in individualized ways that shape their behavior and decision-making. These factors are too often misunderstood or ignored in the design and evaluation of engineering systems. A major challenge for health informatics in the future will be to generate evidence-based information about how people process medical and health-related information, with and without supporting technologies. There will be a much greater need for collaborative efforts among scientists (biomedical, cognitive, and social), practitioners, and engineers, as they design and implement systems, if we are to offer technologies that are embraced and thereby reshape the future of our healthcare for a better quality of life. I will address some of these issues with examples from cognitive informatics studies, which influence users' behavior as they interact with health care technology.

Prof. Roozbeh Ghaffari, Northwestern University, USA Soft, Wearable Systems with Integrated Microfluidics and Biosensors for Remote Health Monitoring

ABSTRACT: Soft bio-electronics and microfluidics, enabled by recent advances in materials science and mechanics, can be designed with physical properties that approach the mechanical properties of human skin. These systems are referred to as epidermal electronics and epifluidics by virtue of their stretchable form factors and soft mechanics compared to conventional packaged electronics and sensors. Here, we present an overview of recent advances in novel materials, mechanics, and designs for emerging classes of fully-integrated epidermal electronics and soft microfluidic systems. These devices incorporate arrays of sensors, microfluidic channels and biochemical assays, configured in ultrathin, stretchable formats for continuous monitoring of electro-chemical signals and biophysical metrics. Quantitative analyses of strain distribution and circuit performances under mechanical stress highlight the utility of these wearable systems in clinical and home environments. We will conclude with representative examples of these wearable systems, which have entered the commercialization phase of deployment.

Prof. Lynn Rochester, Newcastle University, UK. Digital Health Technology - leveraging real-world insights in mobility

ABSTRACT: Mobility is important - the last year has brought this into sharp focus. Mobility is not only a target for intervention, subtle features of mobility (such as how fast someone walks and how variable their steps are) provide us with a window into the brain and body and an indicator of health. As a clinician, mobility has been my focus. In particular, how do we keep people with neurodegenerative disease such as Parkinson's - mobile and safe? This propelled me towards the scientific study of gait - a key feature of mobility. The last 10 years have seen a revolution in digital technology (such as wearables and mobile devices) advancing the study of mobility. Implementing technology in the real-world allows further insights into health previously unobtainable and a ‘living-lab' approach to study and treat mobility loss. Continuous monitoring captures the challenges of mobility that play out in real-time at the intersection between personal, contextual and environmental demands and bring a personalized focus to healthcare. However, large scale implementation of real-world mobility assessment and treatment, although promising, remains tantalizingly out of reach. This talk will focus on experiences and insights using digital technology to quantify mobility in Parkinson's disease, explore challenges to extract meaningful insights from continuous real-world mobility data, and highlight future possibilities. Throughout I will draw on my own experience using digital technology and leverage insights from the work of the Mobilise-D consortium (https://www.mobilise-d.eu/), a large international effort to translate real-world mobility assessment to research and healthcare.

In this session, we will hear and discuss how advanced AI-enabled health informatics have impacted products and services offered by medtech and bioinformatics companies. We will hear the perspective of a handful of selected companies developing novel AI-based solutions, including new devices, sensors, predictive analytics, digital tools and software solutions that contribute to improving and rethinking healthcare systems and promote a better quality of life. We will hear their views on the opportunities and the challenges associated with building new products and services that rely on AI. The format of the session will include short presentations by each participating companies, followed by a moderated panel discussion.

Prof. Alfonso Valencia, ICREA Research Professor and Director of the Life Sciences Department, Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, SP Large networks of disease-disease interactions at the medical and molecular level.

ABSTRACT: Biomedicine is confronting significant challenges for the handling and analysis of large data sets, among them a particularly relevant one is the interaction between diseases, i.e. disease comorbidities. Comorbidities are an important medical and social problem that demands an interpretation of the underlying physiological causes, as a necessary step to progress in its management and control. As a first step in this direction, we have analysed two complementary data sets, one composed by a large collection of expression data (RNAseq data 72 human diseases analysed by 107 studies, including a total number of 4.267 samples, from the GREIN platform) the other one base on medical records from three different medical systems (Blumenau, Brazil; Catalonia, Spain; and Indianapolis, United States) or from previous publications (Hidalgo et al. 2009 and Jensen et al. 2014). With this information, we have constructed two disease-disease interaction networks, one reflecting real-world medical associations and the other the similarities of the molecular profiles of patients of different diseases. Interestingly, the two networks have striking similarities in terms of their organization and characteristics. More importantly, we can show for the first time that most disease interactions have a counterpart at the molecular level. This molecular relationship can be translated into detailed molecular basis of specific disease interactions. I will discuss the implications of these results for the interpretation of diseases interactions at the level of specific genes and pathways, as well as the potential consequences for the management of disease comorbidities.

Based on the work of: Beatriz Urda-García, Jon Sanchez, Rosalba Lepore at BSC.