Stevens Student Team's Diabetes, Heart Disease, Cancer Diagnosis App Tops Blue Cross Healthcare Competition
Pilot-stage Stevens Institute of Technology application combines personalized health information and medical data to warn of potential disease
A two-member team of Stevens Institute of Technology seniors emerged as the top technology winner at the inaugural Health Care Transformation Challenge, sponsored by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey (Horizon BCBSNJ).
Computer engineering major Matthew Sabatini and quantitative finance major Mike Wezyk took home the $5,000 Technology Track first prize for Diagnose.me, a prediction platform that uses artificial intelligence techniques to mine big medical data for trends, then applies that information to individual patients' health information and test results with high accuracy.
"Technology is evolving at a staggeringly rapid pace and when it comes to digital expertise we must look to those who have an abundance of it: our younger generation," said Douglas E. Blackwell, Horizon BCBSNJ Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, who served as one of the judges at the event. "We were beyond impressed with each presentation, but the students from Stevens set an unbelievably high bar with their idea to create a machine learning tool to predict diagnosis for four key diseases. We felt as though we were looking into the future and it was bright."
Sabatini and Wezyk originally created the app for the inaugural Stevens Venture Center-sponsored Digital Healthcare Hackathon, developing the app in Python and integrating medical databases from John Hopkins University, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin and the European Society of Cardiology with user-friendly patient quizzes and basic medical test results.
The Stevens duo says the app attained 83 to 99 percent accuracy predicting the four diseases when running existing patient data sets. While both are weighing significant post-graduation job offers in finance and defense, they may pursue refining the app further and seeking backing in the future outside of working hours.
"We think it could potentially become better than the diagnosis app on the markets," says Sabatini.
"If we do move forward, we would design our own studies and quizzes, which would increase the accuracy even further," adds Wezyk.
ABOUT STEVENS
Stevens Institute of Technology is a premier, private research university situated in Hoboken, New Jersey overlooking the Manhattan skyline. Since our founding in 1870, technological innovation has always been the hallmark and legacy of Stevens’ education and research. Within the university’s three schools and one college, 6,900 undergraduate and graduate students collaborate closely with faculty in an interdisciplinary, student-centric, entrepreneurial environment. A range of academic and research programming spanning business, computing, engineering, the arts and other fields actively advances the frontiers of science and leverages technology to confront our most pressing global challenges. The university is consistently ranked among the nation’s elite for return on tuition investment, career services and the mid-career salaries of alumni.