UAB Biomedical Data Science Hackathon

PhLORENS team presenting their idea to judges.

This year’s University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Biomedical Data Science Hackathon theme was “Intelligent Safety: Pioneering Patient Safety Solution with AI/ML and Data Science.”  The Patient Safety Technology Challenge, with funding from Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative, awarded three prizes at this year’s event. The UAB Biomedical Data Science Hackathon was held virtually on September 9-10, in collaboration with the Center for Clinical Translation Science. A series of workshops and tutorials were scheduled in August to help prepare students in advance of the two-day hackathon. On September 15, teams pitched their innovations to judges via Zoom.

The finalists presented their ideas to judges and a virtual awards ceremony was held September 22. UAB Associate Professor of Medicine Amy Wang, MD served as a judge. She shared, “This year's Intelligent Safety Hackathon was an opportunity to encourage participants to address patient safety challenges using clinical data while also promoting education, training, and networking. I was impressed with the quality of projects and look forward to seeing what they tackle next.”

First place went to Team Deep Sepsis, who received a $2,000 award. Team Deep Sepsis created PhLORENS, an AI-based application for early detection of sepsis in the ICU. They demoed the PhLORENS app, which is a physiological learned object response emergency notification system for sepsis detection. Team members include Kevin Song, Zhandos Sembay, Melissa Hall, and Radomir Slominski, all UAB students.

Second place went to Sepsis Special Ops (SSO), who was awarded $1,500. Team members include Ana M. Chang, Van Huynh, Yishi Qu, and Phuong Quach. They represented UAB, Northwestern University and Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences. Team “Hold the Line” won the $1,000 third place by exploring central line-associated blood stream infections (CLABSI) within UAB electronic health records data. Team members included Curtis and Nate Hendrickson.

The Patient Safety Technology Challenge is excited to see ideas on some of most persistent patient safety issues and congratulates the three teams for their dedication to innovating around important issues like Sepsis and CLABSI.