University College Dublin leads AI research for pre-eclampsia diagnosis

University College Dublin is leading a team that is working on a research initiative that could help transform pre-eclampsia diagnosis using technology from SAS.

A solution has been developed that will support clinicians to make effective and efficient clinical diagnoses of suspected pre-eclampsia, with the use of intelligent and timely risk stratification of patients’ clinical and blood biomarker data.

AI and analytics company SAS is providing the technology with AI_PREMie using SAS Viya hosted on a Microsoft Azure cloud environment.

The University College Dublin team used funding from Science Foundation Ireland to research pre-eclampsia diagnostic techniques. It discovered important biomarkers with diagnostic and predictive powers, which when combined with other clinical data can be used to create an AI model to support clinical decision-making.

AI_PREMie can provide a pre-eclampsia risk score with red, amber or green flags to support clinicians when faced with complex cases. It includes a unified view of the patient data used to create the classification, which incorporates unique platelet biomarkers and other relevant clinical data and demographic information.

Alan McGlinn, director, SAS Ireland, said: “We are delighted to be working alongside Microsoft supporting the tremendous work that’s already been achieved by the team led by University College Dublin and to continue the partnership as they look to broaden the uptake of the AI_PREMie solution.

“This is a great of example of a Data for Good project where data, analytics and AI can support the healthcare sector in saving the lives of patients. Powerful analytics combined with the human expertise of medical professionals is a potent combination and something we can expect to see more of over the coming years.”

Patricia Maguire, professor of biochemistry at University College Dublin, added: “SAS and Microsoft brought experience from banking and government, for example bringing data security skills as well as scalability and resilience. Clinicians must have absolute trust in the system, and SAS and Microsoft were able to help us deliver on this right at the start.”

AI_PREMie is set to be trialled in Dublin maternity hospitals later this year and then rolled out globally in the future.

SAS Viya AI platform was also used for the company’s newest health platform, SAS Health, that aims to simplify health data and management, improve data governance and accelerate patient insights.