Taipei Medical University Hospital on Dec. 7 signed a contract with Taiwan AI Labs to collaborate on introducing an artificial intelligence (AI) system that would provide an earlier warning for sepsis in its intensive care units (ICUs).
The five-year contract with the research organization was signed by hospital superintendent Chen Ray-jade (陳瑞杰) and Taiwan AI Labs founder Ethan Tu (杜奕瑾).
The first phase of the collaboration aims to improve the hospital’s “electronic dashboard” ICU (TED-ICU) by integrating an AI system that could automatically predict the early development of sepsis and alert the resident medical team.
Photo: Wu Liang-yi, Taipei Times
The health conditions of ICU patients can change drastically, and sepsis is a life-threatening condition that occurs in about 437 patients per 100,000 globally, Chen said, adding that studies suggest that sepsis causes about one-third of all deaths in US hospitals.
Previously, sepsis could only be detected after its onset, but after the hospital last year introduced the TED-ICU, medical teams can predict the risk of sepsis about four hours before it occurs, Chen said.
The system works by automatically collecting, integrating, analyzing and keeping a record of ICU patients’ physiological information, the hospital said.
The collaboration with Taiwan AI Labs aims to further improve the dashboard with AI, allowing a real-time alert as soon as it detects the risk of sepsis, hopefully even more than four hours in advance.
Tu said that after his mother passed away from sepsis last year, he began thinking about how to use AI to interpret real-time physiological information to reduce the sepsis mortality rate.
The lab in September developed an AI sepsis detection system and allowed it to learn from the hospital’s data for two months, Tu said, adding that so far, its detection accuracy is at about 85 percent and can hopefully enter clinical use soon.
The hospital said it hopes to introduce AI to learn the medical records of people injured in falls to develop a mechanism to predict high-risk groups for such injuries and to analyze their causes to improve care.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching