Translate Summer Student Project blog: AI systems for predicting delayed discharge of patients

This post is part of a blog series about 13 short-term projects Translate MedTech funded in summer 2019.

These Translate MedTech-funded projects let researchers hire students during their summer break to help develop innovative new medical technologies with commercial potential.

Read these blogs to learn about the work they completed.

Name: Yanxin Shi
Organisation: University of Bradford
Project Title: Developing AI system for Predicting delayed discharge of patients

As a postgraduate student on Big Data Science and Technology MSc Course at the University of Bradford, I am very interested in the application of Artificial Intelligence technology (AI) in the medical field.

My Translate Summer Student Project was focused on applying AI and machine learning technologies to predict the length of stay at hospitals for patients at the point of entry.

I conducted this project under the supervision of Prof Rami Qahwaji (Professor of Visual Computing) and Dr Tom Lawton (Consultant Critical Care & Anaesthesia).

The aim of my project was to develop an Artificial Intelligence system to predict if discharge from hospital for patients would be delayed, mainly because of non-medical reasons.

I received some real datasets from Bradford Institute for Health Research (BIHR), and developed an AI model that implemented artificial neural network and decision tree algorithms to realise the prediction ability of NHS patient information data.

An important part of my work was  pre-processing the data to extract important features to feed to the AI model. The performance evaluation of this AI system was carried out by cross-validation, confusion matrix, RMSR and other assessments, where an average  accuracy of around 85% was achieved.

This was a very exciting project, as it offers a real potential to improve the operation and management of hospitals, and I hope to continue working with BIHR and the University of Bradford to optimize the AI model and conduct more tests in the future.

You can learn more about this project and others at Growing MedTech Translation 2019 on Friday 6 December 2019, where each Translate MedTech Summer Student Project lead will give a presentation about their work.