If you caught my initial post I stated that most of the student projects all revolved around healthcare.  Bill Gates blogged and tweeted about the Imagine Cup competition today as being one of his favorites. 

Team Mobilife from the University of California, Davis, was just announced as the grand prize winner of the eighth annual Imagine Cup United States Finals, and willimage represent the U.S. at the Imagine Cup World Finals in Poland this summer.  Team Mobilife’s project helps field doctors use mobile technology for early detection of some vascular diseases among children in developing regions.

The winner in the Game Design category as well as the other Achievement Award winners are highlighted in the press release.

Academy Award-winning director James Cameron, and the U.S. Dept of Education’s Karen Cator, along with 500 attendees, were present during the final day of competition today at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. and saw how students across the country are using technology to solve some of the world’s toughest problems such as climate change and eradicating extreme poverty.  

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This is a nation-wide student competition currently underway that inspires students to use technology to help solve some of the world’s toughest problems from Microsoft.  You can visit the website and take a look and see what is going on.  Below are 3 projects, all having to do with Healthcare, and their ability to solve what they feel can make a difference in the world by using technology. 

Look a the topics, telehealth, clinical decision support and vascular disease diagnostic tool, the same things I discuss here on the blog and try to keep updated. 

I viewed a few of the videos so if you can drop over to the site and see what’s on the mind of students today with using technology for healthcare solutions. 

By the way, they all talk algorithms!  BD

From the website:

“The fates of these 10 Imagine Cup finalists are in your hands. Check out all the video submissions and then rate your favorites.

Voting ends at 11:59 P.M. Pacific Time on Saturday, April 24, so tell your friends and family to cast their votes to determine the U.S. Imagine Cup 2010 People’s Choice winner! See official rules here.

Check back often to see who’s ahead. You can also follow Imagine Cup news at the Microsoft News Center.”

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More than 80 of the smartest young minds in the U.S. will compete in the Imagine Cup US Finals happening on April 26 at the Newseum in DC.

Now in its eighth year, The Imagine Cup is a worldwide student competition that helps young people apply their imagination, passion and creativity to make a difference in the world. These finalists were chosen from a pool of more than 14,000 entries in the U.S. for their ideas to use technology to help solve poverty, education, healthcare, our environment and halting the spread of HIV/AIDs.

Students will be joined by Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer for Microsoft, and Anthony Salcito, VP of Worldwide Education for Microsoft, where they will display and present their solutions to industry leaders, policy elites and the general public.

Team Information

CDSS-AI, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Students: Brian Keltch, Yuan Lin

Project: A program that integrates Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques with Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS).image

Overview: Our prototype evaluates and compares two techniques that are core forecasting tools in a CDSS dealing with a single medical decision about hepatitis patients. Initial results have shown great promise in accurately predicting Fibrosis Stage in Hepatitis patients. All patient data used in this study is publically available and contains no identifying information. Utilizing this tool could mitigate the need for some liver biopsies in the more than 170 million Hepatitis patients worldwide. The prototype is extendable additional techniques (for example genetic algorithms and logistics regression) and additional medical domain solutions (for example HIV/AIDS).

LifeCode, Wayne State University

Students: Melissa Hui, Steve Markovitch, Fahima Bhuyan and Kun Wang

Project: A tele-health data capture and analysis platform.

Overview: In conversations with various professionals, health care workers and through research, we saw that the mobile platform was very ideal for development in developing nations and that a lot of the need to bring personal health informatics and monitoring as well as excellent medical data management tools to areas that needed infrastructure and low-cost yet efficient alternatives to costly equipment and low care accessibility were well aligned with our team’s focus and abilities. Through the use of sensors, we gain valuable biometric data from the end-user that can be used for diagnostics, epidemiology, public health, emergency triage, data-mining and disease management. While our solution currently has been developed to illustrate its potential to counter Cardiovascular disease (currently the leading cause of death worldwide, nearly 5 times that of HIV/AIDS at 16.7 million deaths annually), our system is highly scalable and can be deployed to encompass a wide range of medical conditions such as HIV/AIDS, maternal health, child health, malaria, and chronic diseases.

Mobilife, University of California, Davis

Students: Kayvon Ghaffari, Audrey Lee, Helena Xu and Wilson To

Project: A mobile diagnostic tool of vascular diseases.

Overview: The Mobilife project introduces innovative application technologies into the market of mobile medicine by pairing the widely-available Windows Mobile platform with computer-assisted intravital microscopy to provide on-field analysis of the human microcirculation to detect developing microangiopathy in children. This non-invasive, in-vivo procedure will provide doctors with information on a patient – enough to pre-diagnose different vascular diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and sickle cell anemia. Although these disorders are normally easy to diagnose in a modern hospital, there is a lack of tools that are readily available to doctors who work in developing regions like Sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Asia, and Oceania. As a result of an inability to detect diseases, child mortality rates remain unacceptably high. Mobilife’s technology offers an approach that cost-effectively provides accurate microcirculatory information to diagnose vascular diseases in children.

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