Seniors create program to estimate post-partum blood loss to prevent emergency
block
Postpartum hemorrhage occurs when a woman loses a severe amount of blood after giving birth, but for many women, it’s hard to quantify what qualifies as “a lot” of blood loss.
That’s where Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering seniors Swathy Ajikumar, Annette Botango, Mereum Fernando, Sofya Kristesashvili, and Aida Starr-Alarcon took their experience in the Clinical Immersion Program to find a solution.
The Clinical Immersion Program is a program designed to enhance biomedical engineering student preparedness for industry positions through exposure to clinical-based needs identification as a method to enhance the design of medical devices.
Their project, part of the annual UIC College of Engineering senior design course, focused on creating an easy method for women to estimate the amount of blood they may lose in non-clinical settings to make sure that they don’t reach a hemorrhagic state before they’re able to seek medical attention.
Through CIP, the seniors shadowed an OB/GYN doctor. The experience inspired them to develop an accessible, affordable, and accurate machine learning algorithm to helps users quantify blood loss at home.
To estimate blood volume, women can upload a photo of used pads to the software, which then estimates how much blood is contained in them.
When the software receives an image not contained in the training dataset, it attempts to predict a volume based on previous training. For example, the group said that the program was tested with a new 85mL image and gave an output prediction of 84.11mL.
“Blood loss is chronically underestimated,” Ajikumar said. “People often are feeling the issues present before they find out that they are experiencing severe blood loss. There’s a high rate of misdiagnosis within this issue that specifically targets women.”
“There isn’t currently a lot of research behind this idea,” Fernando said. “This started as postpartum imaging, but as we did more research, we realized this program can apply to other types of hormonal mutations such as endometriosis, or women on anticoagulant medications.”
Along with the help of their sponsor, Sydney Dautel, UIC College of Medicine Visiting Instructor of Clinical OB/GYN, the group plans to run clinical trials to continue this work and create a mobile app that helps individual users understand levels of blood loss.
black
The group also recently won second place at the annual UIC Blaze Venture Challenge, an annual UIC pitch challenge that encourages student entrepreneurship and innovation where participants can win cash prizes, meet world-class mentors, and gain experience in pitching to investors.
Multiple members of the group also participated in the Global Consortium of Innovation and Engineering in Medicine in Taipei, Taiwan, in early April.