May 13, 2020

HUS Rahul Raj awarded for AI-based algorithm capturing the changes in the prognosis of TBI patients

The algorithm enables monitoring of prognosis in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) during intensive care, even though the patient is unconscious.

Neurosurgery resident Rahul Raj at HUS Helsinki University Hospital has been recognised by The European Association of Neurosurgical Societies for best clinical paper 2020 for his research ”Machine learning-based dynamic mortality prediction after traumatic brain injury” published in Nature’s Scientific Reports.

Treating TBI patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) is challenging for main three reasons, says Rahul Raj.

“First of all, the patient is usually unconscious. Second, there is no objective way to measure the severity of the brain injury. Third, we don’t objectively know how different treatments impact the prognosis of the patients.”

The recognised research paper shows a promising start for future use of machine-learning based solutions in intensive care. It is the world’s first algorithm based on machine-learning, that can help clinicians to quantify the dynamic prognosis of patients with TBI. In practice, this means that there will be a scale of 0 to 100 to describe the probability of death caused by the brain injury.

“With the algorithm we can monitor the patient’s prognosis with intensive care every eight hours even though the patient is unconscious. This way we may also get new information regarding how different treatments affect the patient and assess if they are useful or perhaps harmful,” Raj says.

The work is ongoing and the model will be further tested and developed before someday hopefully it can be tested in the clinics. Rahul Raj emphasises that the code for the algorithm is available online for other researches to develop.

HUS press release in Finnish

More information:

Rahul Raj

rahul.raj@hus.fi
tel. +358 50 427 0698