Precision Care Medicine

Course number: EN.580.480/680
Next availability: Fall 2018

Precision Care Medicine is a two-semester project-based learning course. Projects will use methods of machine learning and mechanistic and statistical modeling to develop novel data-driven solutions to important health care problems that arise in anesthesiology and critical care medicine. The scope of such problems is vast, and few have been approached before. Examples include data- and modeling-driven approaches to: optimal selection of patients to be admitted to ICUs; optimal determination of when it is safe to discharge a patient from an ICU; early prediction of pending changes in the clinical state of patients in an ICU; data-driven optimal selection of patient therapy; and others. In the first semester, students will assemble into teams of 3-4, and will work with their project mentors (clinical faculty in the ACCM Department; Drs. Winslow and Sarma) to develop a project work plan. In the remainder of the course, they will apply engineering approaches to solve the important health care problems in their projects. Class time will include: lectures and tutorials covering the physiology, medicine, and engineering principles relevant to each project; project work in a setting where faculty are available to assist students with challenges. Each team will present project updates to the entire class at regular intervals so that every student becomes familiar with each project. Teams will also be charged with designing, validating and deploying a web-application that delivers the computational method for solving the underlying healthcare problem to the user. HIPAA regulations, use of human subjects data, and requirements for FDA Class II and Medical Device Data Systems approval will be covered.