TIME 13.5.2022 at 09.00-12.30
PLACE Agora, Vesilinnantie 3 Turku, Lecture Hall XXI
Health technology is a crosscutting theme in the Faculty of Technology. Research on health technology spans all departments and focuses, for example, on diagnostic technologies, wearables and devices for preventive health care, biomaterials and AI applications. We offer degree programmes in biotechnology and, starting this year, medical engineering and health technology.
Welcome to our campus to meet our researchers and shape the way we work together in health technology research and in educating new engineering talent.
Sign up for the event by 8.5.2022
09.00 — 09.30 Material interface connecting living and artificial worlds
- Prof. Emilia Peltola, Materials Engineering
09.30 — 10.15 Health technology in teaching
- Prof. Pasi Liljeberg, Health Technology
- Prof. Emilia Peltola, Materials Engineering
- Prof. Saara Wittfooth, Biotechnology
10.15 — 10.30 Coffee
10.30 — 11.00 Privacy preserving health data analytics
- Prof. Antti Airola, Health Technology
11.00 — 11.30 Lateral flow tests - improved diagnostics for emerging markets
- Dr. Iida Martiskainen, Biotechnology
11.30 — 12.30 Lunch and poster session
* The event will not be streamed or recorded
Presentations
Prof. Emilia Peltola’s group focuses on materials in health technology. The success of medical devices is often defined by the interface connecting the living and artificial worlds. In the case of implanted materials, does the material integrate into the body, or does the body form a scar around the implant? For sensing devices, how to detect the tiny amounts of the species of interest among a huge amount of interferents in an environment that fouls the surfaces? Central goal of the research is to understand the interaction of materials and the biological environment better in order to correlate the device performance to the material characteristics.
Development of AI systems for health technology requires access to personal health data, used in both training machine learning models and evaluating how well they generalize to new cases. The privacy of such data should not be compromised at any stage of this process. Prof. Antti Airola's group coordinates the PRIVASA consortium, that does research on methods for privacy preserving health data analytics. A central goal of the research is to develop approaches for releasing anonymous synthetic data that can preserve the statistical properties of sensitive health data, while making re-identification risk negligible. Such data could be especially useful for early-stage development and testing of new health technology solutions.
Lateral flow tests are the most popular tests for point-of-care diagnostics of diseases, but current tests are limited to relatively simple to diagnose diseases. Improving the performance of lateral flow tests would allow their wider use in diagnostics of different diseases. Dr. Iida Martiskainen's group collaborates with the in vitro –diagnostics industry to advance the lateral flow test technology, with the aim of diagnosing challenging diseases such as heart attack and cancer. These more advanced point-of-care tests could help emerging markets access high quality health diagnostics.