From WisPolitics.com/WisBusiness.com …
— Scientists at UW-Madison have detailed a way to incorporate numerous forms of medical data into a set of machine learning models in order to better predict the course of diseases such as cancer.
WARF included the method in its latest round-up of top licensing prospects within its healthcare portfolio, noting it offers a “multi-scale approach to information analysis” across distinct datasets, ranging from medical scans to complex genetic information.
In their patent application, inventors Prof. Pallavi Tiwari and student Olivia Krebs noted routine cancer treatments involve bringing together complementary data sources such as CT and MRI images, results from genome sequencing, cellular-scale findings and clinical data such as age and cognitive scores.
“Comprehensive assessment of this deluge of data by clinicians alone is infeasible,” they wrote, adding “it would be valuable to develop computational frameworks that integrate complementary cross-scale information … to enable discovery of new markers that can pave the way for precision medicine.”
They describe the potential for “integrated prognostic markers” to reliably predict risks associated with survival, as well as disease recurrence or progression.
In its overview on the technology, WARF authors note both diagnosis and prognosis in healthcare stands to benefit from the “recent increase in the performance, costs, and access to sophisticated computational resources” for complex analysis.
Though earlier computational models drawing together various forms of health data have shown improvement over older approaches, the inventors say issues with these efforts are still largely unaddressed. Those include retrospective datasets being unavailable and the challenge of carefully optimizing strategies for combining information, they wrote.
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— UW Health’s new $140 million expansion of its East Madison Hospital will enable 30% more surgeries and 6% more admissions when it opens next month.
The health system today announced the 120,000-square-foot expansion project will open Nov. 2, bringing the hospital’s total size to 620,000 square feet. It added six new operating rooms, more than doubled surgical prep and recovery bay capacity and boosted inpatient bed capacity by 14 to 98.
The added capacity comes amid rising demand for medical services at the hospital, according to details provided by UW Health.
East Madison Hospital has seen surgical volumes rise from about 6,000 procedures in 2015 to 14,000 last year. At the same time, inpatient admissions have doubled from 2,200 to 4,400 per year, according to Ryann DeGraff, vice president and regional chief operating officer for the hospital.
“The need for specialized care continues to grow across the region,” he said in the release. “Many patients travel to Madison for care that isn’t available in their local communities, and this expansion helps us meet that increased demand and improve access for patients across Wisconsin.”
The hospital says it has hired 250 workers to meet the needs of the expanded space, in addition to its existing staff.
See the release below.
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– UW Health: East Madison Hospital $140 million expansion opens Nov. 2
