Preeclampsia affects expectant mothers and can cause dangerously high blood pressure. One in every 12 expectant mothers will experience it. Globally, a mother or her baby dies every 60 seconds from the condition. The only cure for preeclampsia is delivery and it is still diagnosed by taking blood pressure and urinalysis.

Diagnosis for the condition hasn’t changed for hundreds of years. It can be difficult for clinicians to identify which cases are likely to become life threatening. When expectant mothers are diagnosed with preeclampsia, they often have to wait out the rest of the pregnancy in a tertiary hospital, which may be far from home.

Professor Patricia Maguire is a biomedical scientist from UCD and has recently joined Insight as a Funded Investigator. Her many years of work with the blood samples of expectant mothers means she has amassed a huge amount of data about this condition.

‘After years of working with Excel spreadsheets I became interested in advanced statistics,’ says Professor Maguire. ‘My team and I started to use Machine and Deep Learning to make sense of the all the data that we have collected.’

Through her work leading the UCD Institute for Discovery, Patricia Maguire learned the value of bringing teams of different disciplines together to tackle global challenges. She realised that it would be useful to assemble a broader range of disciplines to attack the challenge of using health data generated by researchers to find new solutions in healthcare. She pitched the project, called AI PREMie, to SFI (now Research Ireland) and won a special prize in the AI for Social Good Challenge Funding.

AI PREMie seeks to use the biomarkers in the blood of sick expectant mothers to risk stratify preeclamspia. Combined with a range of other patient data, Prof Maguire suspected it could yield a powerful clinical decision support system.

‘My project colleague, Professor Fionnuala Ní Áinle (Consultant Haematologist in both the Rotunda and the Mater Hospitals), first approached Maguire to understand if new biomarkers could help in the clinical decision-making process.

At first it was just Maguire and Ní Áinle working on the project –  now the group has 30 members working across the three Dublin maternity hospitals. The AI PREMie team now comprises obstetricians, gynaecologists, midwives, lab managers, haematologists, health economists, biomedical scientists and computer scientists. That’s where the Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics comes in. Patricia has been working closely with the Director of Insight at UCD, Professor Brian MacNamee to ensure that the data part of the AI PREMie project is sound.

The project has advanced so far in four years that the team is now in a commercialisation fund from Enterprise Ireland.  The product is an algorithm that takes values from both bloods and other variables and suggests a supportive diagnosis to guide the clinician.

Recognising that this approach could be applied across other health fields and that there are many researchers in UCD who likely have vast quantities of useful but unused data, Professor Maguire has since spearheaded the UCD AI Healthcare Hub to identify data-rich projects and guide their researchers in how to collect, process and use the data.

‘There is a massive chasm between the information being collected and the end user, the patient.  Amazing information sits on academics’ computers. We have to get it into the real world. Once it’s out there, how do we integrate it into hospital systems? If we can learn to seamlessly integrate AI PREMie into the Irish hospital system, the approach will work for other health areas too.’

The potential benefit for expectant mothers is considerable – right now sick expectant mothers could spend weeks or even months of their pregnancy on bedrest at home or in one of a handful of city-based hospitals.

‘The neonatal care system in Ireland is excellent,’ says Maguire, ‘and while many women have to spend a lot of time in hospital, mothers and babies rarely die from preeclampsia here. However, in other countries like the US and the developing world the death rates are tragically high. In the US, women of colour are at particular risk.

‘We really haven’t moved on that much in our understanding of the aetiology of preeclamspia. Research into women’s health globally has been very poor. We know aspirin can help if prescribed before 16 weeks of pregnancy but it is only used when a woman has notable risk factors. Unfortunately, however, most of the time a woman will have no obvious risk factors.

‘Insight is moving more into the realm of data-driven health care. Connecting the health researchers with the data scientists is the way forward. We all need to be speaking the same language. Working with Insight we can refine this data that is giving us, finally, new information about diagnosis and treatment and improving quality of life.’

In interview with Louise Holden

Pictured: Professor Patricia Maguire and Professor Fionnuala Ní Áinle