Embracing AI to revolutionise healthcare
A not-for-profit partnership between Gold Coast Health, industry and universities, IntelliHQ (Intelligent Health Queensland) is dedicated to promoting research, investment, and monetisation of next-generation AI and machine learning technologies in the health sector. It aims to enhance patient outcomes, improve quality of care, create opportunities for skills, jobs and venture development, and encourage investment. By harnessing trusted AI, IntelliHQ aspires to become a globally recognised healthcare innovation and commercialisation hub.
Building a global healthcare AI capability promises to deliver significant benefits, not only by relieving pressure on the medical system resulting from spiraling costs, but also by contributing to broader technological economic growth, global competitiveness, and skill creation.
But to realise its aspirations, IntelliHQ has to overcome several challenges and obstacles to AI adoption in healthcare. It needs to build community trust, and maintain secure access to patient data. As such, IntelliHQ needed a technology partner to enable it to achieve its goals.
IntelliHQ engages TechConnect
The Solution
To extract ICU data to the cloud, IntelliHQ used TechConnect’s Panacea toolset, a C# library and Windows service that connects to a GE Carescape Gateway High Speed Data Interface, subscribe to data feeds and push these data feeds to the cloud via AWS Kinesis Firehose, Amazon’s high speed data ingestion service.
As actual ICU data could not be streamed from a hospital to the cloud until all custodianship processes has been finalised, this proof-of-concept utilised a demonstration monitor to simulate a typical healthy heartbeat, several abnormal rhythms, and test with various combinations of leads connected.
Once subscribed to a data feed, the Windows service inspects each packet to identify source information, and then converts the ECG waveform and extra numeric data into a hexadecimal representation for transport to the cloud. The source information is parsed by an AWS Lambda function, which then writes the data into an Amazon S3 folder structure that uses folder names for a simple organisational scheme.
Parameters are extracted from the AWS Kinesis Firehose stream data by the Amazon Lambda function in a structure format that reflects the default naming convention for Hive partitions on Amazon S3. Many AWS and Hadoop compatible tools (like Amazon Athena) can use this partitioning scheme to efficiently select subsets of data when queried by these parameters.
Once the data was uploaded to Amazon S3 via Panacea in its proprietary raw hex format, they required conversion to a broadly supported file format using an Amazon EMR cluster to handle the parallel transform operations, for which Zeppelin was chosen. It exposes a web-accessible notebook interface to run code and display resulting visualisations, and each notebook consists of a sequence of cells which can utilise a different parser. This provided easy access to Spark, SQL and Scala for data analytics.
IntelliHQ then unpackaged the raw waveform and numerics data into a human readable tabular file format using a combination of PySpark and SparkSQL code. They chose the widely supported csv format, and created annotation files that labelled normal vs abnormal waveform periods. The next data preparation steps took place in Amazon Sagemaker, which gave access to serverless resources for training and deployment. After the addition of front end graphics, the resulting visualisation displays in a simple UI. The code is then packaged with Amazon Elastic Container Service for deployment.
The Benefits
The Outcome