CHIMERA workshop at BioMedEng22

BioMedEng is an annual conference of Biomedical Engineers, Medical Engineers and Bioengineers and this year its eagerly anticipated return to an in-person event was held at UCL on 8th-9th September.

As part of an exciting programme of keynote speakers, alongside themed oral and poster sessions, there were six workshops one of which was focused on the CHIMERA hub. The workshop had five early-career researchers as speakers from across the data science, biomechanical modelling and machine learning streams, all talking about the latest research progress within the hub.

The informal workshop setup allowed questions and discussion throughout the presentations. Our first speaker was Dr Victoria Volodina (UCL Maths/CORU) who presented a dynamics Bayesian network approach to gain insight into the effects of clinical interventions on the oxygen dissociation curve of ICU patients.

A second data science talk was given by PhD student Ali Septiandri (UCL Statistical Science), explaining the vital importance of tracking the pH of blood in ICU patients.

Biomechanical modelling talks were given by two PhD students, Abi Smith (UCL Maths) and Manuel Teixeira-Cabeleira (UCL Mech Eng). Abi discussed her work on the effect of patient positioning, such as the usefulness of so-called “proning” patients who are critically-ill with COVID as has been recently mentioned in the media. Manuel discussed his approach to developing a ICU digital twin that has the potential to replicate the cardiac and respiratory functioning of an ICU patient.

Our final speaker was Dr Sandip Varkey George (UCL Computer Science) on the advanced machine learning techniques being developed in CHIMERA and, in particular, his work on using such techniques to predict failure of extubation in ICU patients.

Overall the workshop was a lively and much-needed in-person networking discussion for the CHIMERA hub and its early career researcher. Hopefully, similar workshops and outreach events will be held by the hub in the future.