Technion, U. of Missouri team takes home second at medical hackathon
Over 1,000 people participated in this year's hackathon, which invites students, doctors, engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs from all over to compete to create innovative medical technologies.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFThe Viz.ai stroke triage and notification platform (photo credit: VIZ.AI)
Students from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and the University of Missouri (Mizzou) took home second place at the John's Hopkins University MedHacks competition this year for their application used in the early detection of strokes.Over a thousand people participated in this year's hackathon, which invites students, doctors, engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs from all over to compete to create innovative medical technologies.The Technion and Mizzou students created the Scan&Sound application, which won second in the "Personalized Medicine Using Data-Driven Healthcare" category. Scan&Sound uses artificial intelligence to study voices and facial expressions in order to subtly detect a stroke while it's still in the early stages of development.The application's ability to alert to the onset of a stroke allows users to seek emergency care ahead of time in order to seek preventative measures.Hadas Braude, one of the Technion students and who headed the team, came up with the solution after someone close to her suffered from a stroke. Braude said that the person's family members noticed something off throughout the day, but didn't think that the ending result would be a stroke."As a result, the man arrived at the hospital late and missed the ‘treatment window,'" said Braude. "Since then, I haven’t stopped thinking about how to prevent the next incident, and have asked myself how it can be possible that the telephone, which is always with us, gathers information about us, but cannot detect and warn that something is wrong with us."Braude and her teammate Sean Heilbronn-Duron met at the T2Med competition held by the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion this year and decided to bring on Ron Liraz, a talented electrical engineer, to compete together at MedHacks. In Israeli fashion, the other two members of the team, Shunit Polinsky and Leeore Levinstein, were found through friends and family.
