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Global Health: Prevention of diabetic foot ulceration and amputation

Method to thermally diagnose diabetic foot ulcers.

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Project Overview

Diabetes is becoming an international epidemic with India being tagged the Diabetic capital of the world in recent years. It is estimated that anywhere from 50-90% of Indian diabetics are undiagnosed in rural areas of the country, leading to costly complications of diabetes, of which the most common is the development of a diabetic foot ulcers leading to lower limb amputation.

There is currently no way of identifying which patients are at greatest risk or on the brink of ulceration. If it was possible to identify and perhaps predict which patients are at greatest risk for developing an ulcer, healthcare costs and the incidence of amputation could greatly be reduced. The client, through a thermal imaging study of over 250 patients feet in India, has shown that thermal imaging could be used to reveal which diabetic patients had patches of inflammation perhaps indicating an impending ulcer. Primitive data analysis of the images shows that this could be a novel method of determining which patients are on the brink of ulceration, and implementations of AI algorithms could further strengthen the interpretation and predictive power of these images.

The client proposes a thermal device to streamline a way of measuring temperature from the feet of diabetic patients to serve as a diagnostic tool in Indian hospitals as well as an app-based software to further interpret the images collected by the client as well as the thermal maps that the team will collect with their instrumentation. Specifically, the client would like to develop an artificially intelligent algorithm to be able to categorize which patients are at greatest risk of ulceration based on the thermal scans of their feet.

Team Picture

Team members from left to right: Tamarin Tandra, Thor Larson, Carson Gehl, Jarett Jones
Team members from left to right: Tamarin Tandra, Thor Larson, Carson Gehl, Jarett Jones

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Contact Information

Team Members

  • Thor Larson - Team Leader
  • Jarett Jones - Communicator
  • Carson Gehl - BSAC & BWIG
  • Tamarin Tandra - BPAG

Advisor and Client

  • Dr. Jeremy Rogers - Advisor
  • Kayla Huemer - Client

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