Purdue team awarded $1.9M DoD grant for burn treatment research
Researchers from the College of Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Department of Statistics are working with experts from the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research Burn Center and the Fairbanks Burn Center in Indianapolis to develop an automated burn diagnosis system using artificial intelligence that will diagnose and treat burn victims.
The team for AutoMated BUrn Diagnostic System for Healthcare (AMBUSH) includes Showalter Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering Charles Bouman; IE Professor Juan Wachs, an adjunct professor of surgery at the Indiana University School of Medicine; Yexiang Xue, assistant professor of computer science; Lingsong Zhang, associate professor of statistics; Anders Carlsson of the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research (ISR); and Gayle Gordillo and Mohamed El Masry from the IU School of Medicine.
The team was awarded a $1.9-million grant from the Department of Defense to further the research, along with a $380,000 grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH). The group’s research recently was presented at the Military Health System Research Symposium (MHSRS).
Each member of the team brings expertise in at least one of the related fields of computer vision, artificial intelligence, burn/trauma intensive care and emergency/pre-hospital medicine.
The AMBUSH system will enable medics to perform triage and provide initial care in a prompt guided manner, leading to improved patient prognosis and increased survival rates of service members with critical injuries caused by burns in combat. Because it uses ultrasound technology capable of connecting to a smartphone, it has the benefit of being lightweight, critical for use in the battlefield.
“Burn diagnosis is often needed in the battlefield, and paradoxically there is where we have fewer experts available,” Wachs said. “Even expert diagnosis is, at best, 75% accurate in terms of the diagnosis at the point of injury. That’s where an expert decision-making system based on AI with super-human performance can make a difference.”
Read more about the grant and the research on IE's website.